Beatriz Bustos Is an Assistant Professor at the Universidad de Chile. She holds a PhD in Geography and a Master in Public Administration from Syracuse University. She holds a Master in Anthropology and Development and a BA in Public Administration from Universidad de Chile. Her research focus is on the intersection between environmental policy and development geography. From a political ecology background, she looks at the tension between local landscapes endowed with natural resources and national policies defining its exploitation.
She is concerned with the consequences of such policies for social justice and local development. She has worked professionally as researcher in RIDES, an environmental independent think tank exploring issues of trade and environment, public participation in environmental policy. She wants to understand strategies used by local actors to introduce their demands into the environmental agenda, and how these strategies are transforming the material landscape, which they aim to protect from the impacts of neoliberalism. She was awarded a Fulbright-OAS scholarship in 2004 to study environmental policy in the United States. Currently she works in an ECOs-CONICYT project to research the wine industry in Chile and France.