Lorena De la Puente Burlando

Lorena is a Ph.D. candidate for the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability (IoES) at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is a Peruvian sociologist and Latin Americanist with expertise in mining governance and conflicts, participatory governance, and gender-differentiated impacts in Peru and the Andean Region. Today, her research focuses on lithium mining’s policy design process, where government agencies, corporations, and civil society work together to determine regulatory policies. Lorena compares the cases of lithium extraction in Imperial County, California and Puno, Peru to improve the institutions that condition who wins and who loses in efforts to mitigate climate change through mineral extraction. Her goal is to contribute to preventing the replication of mining’s problematic history, with resource conflicts potentially deteriorating political systems worldwide. Before starting her Ph.D. at IoES, Lorena worked as a Latin America officer for the Natural Resource Governance Institute (2017-20) and as a part-time professor of social science at Universidad del Pacífico (2017-20). She obtained her bachelor’s degree in social science from Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú (2013) and her master’s at Oxford University’s Latin American Centre (2016). Lorena began her Ph.D. studies as a Fulbright grantee, has worked as a teaching fellow for IoES, and as a research assistant for the Climate and Community Project.