Santiago Quintero

I joined the Department of Political Economy as a PhD researcher in the autumn of 2021, fully funded by the ESRC and the London Interdisciplinary Social Science Doctoral Training Partnership. My research focuses on complex governance systems, bureaucratic politics and environmental policy, with a focus on Latin America and the Global South.

I hold an MSc in Social Research Methods from the London School of Economics (UK), an MSc in Applied Economics and a BA in Political Science from EAFIT University (Colombia). Before joining King’s, I worked as a researcher and consultant for the World Bank, the FAO-UN, the Colombian National Government, and the Metropolitan Area of Medellín (Colombia). I also worked as a teaching fellow at UNAULA (Colombia).   

Office hours

By appointment

Research interests

• Bureaucratic politics
• Environmental governance
• Social network analysis
• Computational social science
• Latin America
• Global South

Teaching modules

• Environmental Governance
• The Politics of Policy Making
• Statistics for Political Science 2

Doctoral research

The Bureaucratic Politics of Environmental Governance Networks

In my dissertation, I explore how public administration’s political and organisational dimensions affect the emergence and evolution of collaborative governance networks aimed at managing natural resources. In particular, I analyse how patronage—the political use of public employment—affects the dynamics of decentralised and horizontal modes of governance. Using different quantitative and computational methods, I show that the processes and outcomes of environmental governance networks depend on the autonomy and professionalisation of public bureaucracies and that higher levels of public administration’s politicisation make collaboration more prone to be defined by electoral cycles. 

PhD supervisors

Dr Francesca Pia Vantaggiato and Professor Christel Koop