About
PhD topic: Navigating Climate and Conflict: Adaptation Actions in Fragile Contexts
PhD supervisors: Professor Sandra Jovchelovitch and Dr Frédéric Basso
Marie's research is focused on how pastoral and agro-pastoral communities in Somalia and South Sudan adapt to climate change where conflict and climate pressures intersect. Her work examines how people understand, evaluate, and pursue adaptation under these overlapping pressures, with a focus on migration as a key strategy. She pays close attention to how gender, age, social position, and local meanings of livelihood viability shape who gets to adapt, and how. Her research works to move beyond individualistic models of decision-making in behavioural science, asking why externally designed interventions often fail to reflect local realities. The aim is to generate empirically grounded, community-informed insights for more context-sensitive resilience programming in fragile settings.
Alongside her PhD, Marie works as the Behavioural Insights Advisor in the Climate Research & Innovation team at the International Rescue Committee's Airbel Impact Lab, focusing on climate resilience in displaced and conflict-affected communities. She has worked across Niger, Yemen, South Sudan, Somalia, North East Syria, and Honduras. She holds an MSc in Behavioural Science from LSE and a BA in Emerging Markets from Maastricht University, and has previously worked with GIZ, Ashoka, PwC, and UNESCO.
Awards: Full PhD Scholarship, LSE Global School of Sustainability