Rate My Professor Antonella Maiello

Antonella Maiello is an Assistant Professor of Governance of Sustainability at the Institute of Public Administration, Faculty of Governance and Global Affairs of Leiden University (The Hague campus). Her research concerns processes, practices, and experiments of social and economic change in sustainability-related governance domains including waste, water, energy, and food, with a specific interest in waste and circularity. She investigates transformations triggered by collective actions and subjects such as communities, cooperatives, and commoning initiatives. Maiello examines the relations and encounters these publics develop with the state at multiple institutional scales, focusing on values like care and stewardship, and knowledge and skills that drive these interactions and their impact on ecosystems and place livability. Engaging political ecology theories, she employs socio-spatial constructs—scale, networks, boundaries, and infrastructures—as analytical lenses for political relationalities and power dynamics. She favors transdisciplinary methods, including action research, and commits to the societal impact of academic work.

Her current research agenda includes migrant skills in textile repairs and their effects on migrant integration and post-capitalist economic diversification; networks in post-consumer textile flows and value chains; reclaimers communities in waste governance politics and practice (Rio de Janeiro State); institutional impacts of participatory multi-modelling for regional energy decision-making (Netherlands); and collectives-state relationships in community-driven sustainability initiatives. Key publications are “Co-designing a research agenda for climate adaptation in El Salvador’s coffee sector: a transdisciplinary perspective” (2024); “Temporalities of energy justice: changing justice conceptions in Dutch energy policy between 1974 and 2022” (2024); “Commoning, access, and sovereignty: Disentangling land–food relations in the case of peasant livestock farmers in Romania” (2024); “In, out or beyond? Waste pickers and policy networks: a story from Jardim Gramacho (Rio de Janeiro)” (2022); “The spotted zebra: cohabitation between informal solutions and public-owned infrastructures for water supply in the Rio de Janeiro Metropolitan Region” (2021); and “Water supply system in the Rio de Janeiro Metropolitan Region: open issues, contradictions and challenges for water access in an emerging mega-city” (2019). Her work has over 647 citations on Google Scholar.