Prof. Dr. Marie-Catherine Riekhof
Vita
Marie-Catherine Riekhof heads the “Center for Ocean and Society” and has been Professor for Political Economy for Resource Management with a focus on marine and coastal resources at the Faculty of Agricultural and Nutritional Sciences since November 2019.
After studying economics at Kiel University (PhD 2014), she worked at the Center of Economic Research at ETH Zurich (Switzerland) in the “Macroeconomics” working group for several years, where she researched political-economic topics in the field of climate and technology policy. In 2019, she joined the research project marEEshift at the University of Freiburg in the working group "Environmental Economics and Resource Management". She gained further international experience as a World Bank consultant in India and during research stays in Senegal and the USA. Mutual exchange exists with colleagues from Norway, Peru and Sweden.
Research questions
Marie-Catherine Riekhof works conceptually and with quantifiable ecological-economic models and conducts empirical studies. She examines the effects of various institutional regulations in the field of natural resources. Problems in the implementation are discussed, for example to take into account the different effects on transaction costs.
How do institutional regulations (e.g. international agreements on fishing rights) and the use of new technologies (e.g. industrialization of the fishing fleet, desalination technologies, marine aquaculture) influence the use of natural resources (fish, binding of CO2, extraction of raw materials)? How does the distribution of profits and risks between different user groups change (e.g. coastal fishing vs. deep sea fishing, tourism, nature conservation)?
Which factors influence the feasibility of environmental policy (e.g. regulatory costs, interest groups, narratives, beliefs)?
How can we couple different models to bring together the findings from different disciplines, and how can we enter into dialogue with different user groups in order to improve the results through better coordinated policy programs?