Eija Ranta

• Senior Lecturer in Development Studies
• Head of Discipline of Development Studies
• Associate researcher of the Helsinki Institute of Sustainability Science (HELSUS)
• Board member of the Society and Change study programme
• Vice-member of the University of Helsinki Equality and Non-Discrimination Board
• Principal Investigator for the Academy of Finland research project 'Citizenship Utopias in the Global South: The Pursuit of Transformative Alternatives in Times of Disillusionment' (2019-2023)

My research examines complex articulations between development, politics and power. I am interested in the concepts and practices of development, as well as in the decolonizing alternatives to mainstream development and neoliberal globalization. In terms of politics, I navigate at the intersections of formal political organizations, state bureaucracy, and transformative politics at the sphere of social movements and civil society. I look at power as intricate governmental assemblages, entailing local, national, and global processes. My interdisciplinary social scientific approach draws on political anthropology, ethnographies of development aid, Modernity/Coloniality/Decoloniality thinking and political economy of development. 

My latest book Vivir Bien as an Alternative to Neoliberal Globalization (Routledge, 2018) examines indigenous politics, state formation and transformative alternatives to mainstream development thinking through the ethnographic analysis of state discourses and bureaucratic applications of the notion of Vivir Bien/Buen Vivir (living well) in Andean Bolivia. I investigated the potentials and challenges in the search for more just, inclusive and ecologically sustainable alternatives to growth-based development models in the global South.

Keywords: Politics of development, state formation, power, governmentality, civil society, social movements, citizenship, decoloniality, transformative alternatives, political economy of development.

Country experience: Bolivia, Kenya, Cuba, Nicaragua, Ecuador, Ghana, Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, Costa Rica, Peru, Chile and Brazil.