Postdoctoral researcher
Dr Claudia Coral is a postdoctoral researcher at the Agrifood Chain Management Group in the Department of Agricultural Economics at Humboldt Universität zu Berlin, Germany. She holds a doctorate in agricultural sciences and a master’s degree in the management of natural resources. She previously worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Leibniz Centre for Agricultural Landscape Research (ZALF), within the research area “Land Use and Governance”.
Dr Coral’s research focuses on social justice in land and agrifood systems, particularly land-use change, historical and cultural drivers of change, global agrifood value chains, sustainability standards, food resistance movements, and governance responses to extractivism. She approaches these research areas as deeply interconnected, examining how global extractive dynamics shape both land governance and agrifood value chains, and how questions of social justice emerge through struggles over territory, labour, sustainability, resource control, and food integrity.
Methodologically, her work is grounded in historical and comparative mixed methods research design. She combines comparative historical analysis with narrative, discourse and social network analysis, and integrates qualitative and quantitative evidence across time, space and levels of analysis. In her work, history serves not only as context but as a methodological resource for empirical inquiry and theory development.
Research Interests
- Power, responsibility and social justice in global agrifood value chains
- Land-use change and food systems transformation in historical perspective
- Governance responses to extractivism and struggles over territory
- Historical and comparative mixed methods research design
Selected Publications
Coral C, Löhr K, Ollendorf F, Tokou BA, Adou Yao CY, Sieber S. Shifting the narrative: Women farmers’ agency at the land–labour interface in cocoa production. Journal of Rural Studies. 2026;104088. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrurstud.2026.104088 [Open Access]
Hambloch C, Coral C, Maschhaupt G, Mithöfer D. Power from below: rethinking bargaining power in global value chains. Review of International Political Economy. 2026:1–34. https://doi.org/10.1080/09692290.2025.2610737 [Open Access]
Coral C, Mithöfer D. Integrating social vulnerability into food fraud vulnerability assessment: policy implications for authenticity in Spanish honey. Food Policy. 2025;136:102954. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.foodpol.2025.102954 [Open Access]
Coral C, Carcamo R, Ollendorf F, Tokou BA, Adou Yao CY, Sieber S, et al. Elongating the causes of social vulnerability: historical analysis of social sustainability dimensions in the Ivorian cocoa sector. World Development. 2024;183:106727. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.worlddev.2024.106727 [Open Access]
Coral C, Plieninger T, Sieber S, Graw V. Extractivism triggering new forms of governance for the rights of nature: the case of Northwest Ecuador. Geoforum. 2024;156:104111. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2024.104111 [Open Access]
Coral C, Mithöfer D. The backbone of agrifood value chain resilience: innovation in the Ecuadorian banana value chain from a historical perspective. World Development Perspectives. 2023;29:100476. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wdp.2022.100476 [Open Access]
Coral C, Mithöfer D. Contemporary narratives about asymmetries in responsibility in global agri-food value chains: the case of Ecuadorian stakeholders in the banana value chain. Agriculture and Human Values. 2023;40(3):1019–1038. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-022-10405-3 [Open Access]
Friis C, Hernández-Morcillo M, Baumann M, Coral C, Frommen T, Ghoddousi A, et al. Enabling spaces for bridging scales: scanning solutions for interdisciplinary human–environment research. Sustainability Science. 2023;18:1251–1269. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11625-022-01271-3 [Open Access]
Coral C, Bokelmann W, Bonatti M, Carcamo R, Sieber S. Understanding institutional change mechanisms for land use: lessons from Ecuador’s history. Land Use Policy. 2021;108:105530. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.landusepol.2021.105530 [Open Access]
Coral C, Bokelmann W, Bonatti M, Carcamo R, Sieber S. Agency and structure: a grounded theory approach to explain land-use change in the Mindo and western foothills of Pichincha, Ecuador. Journal of Land Use Science. 2020;15(4):547–569. https://doi.org/10.1080/1747423X.2020.1811791 [Open Access]
