María Alejandra Vélez
Director CESED, Los Andes University
About this speaker
Director of the Center for Studies on Security and Drugs (CESED), Associate professor at the Faculty of Economics, Universidad de los Andes. She is an economist from Universidad de los Andes and Ph.D. in Economics of Natural Resources from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She was an Associate Professor in the area of Socio-Environmental Sustainability at the School of Management, Universidad de los Andes (2008-2019), post-doctoral researcher at CRED (Center for Research on Environmental Decisions) at Columbia University, NYC (2006 -2008) and visiting professor at the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at Duke University, Durham, NC (2013). Her research focuses on governance and institutional design for natural resource management in rural communities of the global south. She is currently studying the design of payment for environmental services programs, the impact of collective property in Afro-Colombian communities in the Pacific Coast of Colombia and the dynamics of expansion of illicit crops in Colombia.