Gonzalo Cortés-Capano is an interdisciplinary environmental social scientist working at the intersection of geography, rural development, biodiversity conservation and sustainability. He joined the Social-Ecological Interactions in Agricultural Systems Group at the Universities of Göttingen and Kassel in September 2024 as an Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellow.

He received his PhD from the Department of Geosciences and Geography at the University of Helsinki and later worked as a Postdoctoral Fellow in sustainability science at the School of Resource Wisdom, University of Jyväskylä, Finland. Beyond academia, Gonzalo has supported the design and implementation of conservation programs and protected areas in Uruguay. His research combines theoretical and empirical approaches to examine how people relate to land and nature, how environmental change is experienced, and how knowledge, values, and practices shape rural transitions and contested sustainability pathways.

As a Humboldt Fellow with the SEI Group, his project “Rural Transitions Toward Multifunctional Landscapes in Europe” investigates how rural transitions toward sustainable and multifunctional futures are enacted and experienced by farmers and other rural actors across diverse landscapes. Through comparative case studies in the French Alps and central Germany, it examines how actors’ motivations, landscape dynamics, and institutional frameworks interact in practice to produce multiple transition pathways. Using ethnographic and narrative methods, the research contributes to rural development debates by revealing how everyday practices, struggles, and social innovations shape broader processes of landscape transformation and environmental justice.

Publications
Publications and further information are available on Google Scholar, Researchgate, Linkedin, and Bluesky.