Dr Silvana (Lilli) Rupprechter is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the African Leadership Centre, King’s College London. Her research examines the co-production of knowledge, expertise, and justice in the context of climate adaptation planning and critical mineral extraction and governance. At the heart of her work, is a commitment to:

• Critically investigate and reframe just transitions. Working with communities affected by the mining of resources used in energy transition technologies in Australia, Chile, and Ghana, she examines how disagreements over what “justice” means and how it is realised emerge and the consequences of this for policy action. As part of the UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship project, “Justice in Critical Minerals Governance and Energy Transitions”, she aims to co-produce a practical framework for governments, industry, communities, and international organisations on how to make fairer decisions.
• Interrogate the politics of co-production. Engaging scientists, policymakers, and stakeholders responsible for the design and delivery of Austria’s regional climate adaptation projects, her LISS DTP PhD studentship “Adaptation truth: Co-producing climate adaptation information and decision-making in Austria”, examined how different (and sometimes competing) rationales for co-production are justified and how efforts to control how co-production should be done (via prescribed rules, procedures, and best practice guides) introduce tensions over what constitutes successful adaptation, who defines it, how understandings become stabilised, and what happens as a result of this.

Before entering academia, Lilli worked for the Austrian Agency for Health and Food Safety as a climate communication specialist, where she was responsible for translating and communicating climate information and researching risk perception in Austrian society.

Since then, she has completed her PhD in Climate Policy and Governance (Human Geography) at King’s College London, which was nominated for the “Outstanding PhD Thesis of the Year” award; been seconded to the UK Parliament to deliver a project training researchers on how to present evidence to Select Committee inquiries; and currently serves as a national expert advisor for the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre project on evidence-informed policymaking (EIPM 2.0).

Lilli holds a BA in Sociology, Politics and Economics from Zeppelin University and an MSc in Global Environmental Politics and Society from the University of Edinburgh.

Research

• Different understandings of justice in the critical mineral sector and how these are constructed
• Climate adaptation planning, decision-making and action
• The politics of monitoring and standardisation
• Knowledge systems and the politics of co-production
• Participatory research methods
• Evidence informed policymaking and how evidence is understood and travels into policy 

Further details

See Lilli's research profile