Politics of Climate Change, Indigenous Sustainable Development, International Development

Heike holds a PhD from the Free University of Berlin (2003) in political science, an MA from Bonn University (2000) in political science, economics and Japanese studies, and a BA from the University of East Anglia (1996) in Contemporary European Studies. She was awarded a DAAD/Monbusho scholarship (2000-02) to conduct doctoral research at the University of Tokyo and a Bonn University Exchange Scholarship (1994/95) for a year abroad at the University of East Anglia.

Heike Schroeder is Professor of Environmental Governance at the School of International Development, University of East Anglia. Her work focuses global (environmental) politics, the politics of the international climate negotiations and critiques of current climate policies, indigenous peoples/knowledge and decolonisation, transformative learning, trust, food and nutrition, planetary health, the link between climatic changes and industrial agriculture and systemic constellations as a method of embodied enquiry. She is PI of the Indigenous-International Interactions for Sustainable Development (INDIS) project. She is also a lead faculty member of the Earth System Governance project. Heike was a senior fellow at the Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies (IASS) in Potsdam in 2019. 

From 2007 to 2011, Heike was a Tyndall senior research fellow and an Oxford Martin senior fellow in forest governance at the Environmental Change Institute, University of Oxford. From 2003 to 2007, she was a researcher at the Bren School of Environmental Science and Management, University of California, Santa Barbara, as well as the Executive Officer of a 10-year international research project on the Institutional Dimensions of Global Environmental Change (IDGEC), a core project of the International Human Dimensions Programme on Global Environmental Change (IHDP).

Heike's research interests include global (environmental) politics, the politics of the international climate negotiations, indigenous peoples/knowledge and decolonisation, transformative learning, trust, food and nutrition, planetary health and the link between climatic changes and industrial agriculture.

Research Activities

Indigenous peoples/knowledge and decolonisation

Indigenous-International Interactions for Sustainable Development

This project seeks to explore and facilitate the ways in which indigenous knowledge can inform international efforts to develop sustainably.

Modules I teach on

Perspectives on Globalisation

Climate Change and Development II: Governance, Policy and Society

Globalised Agriculture and Food Systems

Decolonial Knowledge Production

PhD supervision interests

Indigenous peoples/knowledge and decolonisation

Planetary health and rewilding

Transformations and transformative (un)learning for wellbeing

Systemic constellations as a method of embodied enquiry

The politics of international climate negotiations and critiques of current climate policies

The links between climatic changes and industrial agriculture

Trust, knowledge, mindsets and global/local governance

Global/local environmental governance/politics/issues (including food/nutrition, plastics, POPs and mining)

Current PhD students

Jing Tian, UEA

Past PhD students 

Karen Anderton, Oxford

Lucy Baker, UEA

Wei Shen, UEA

Sabine Dauth, UEA

Yuli Shan, UEA 

Yang Xia, UEA

Susan Conlon, UEA

Heran Zheng, UEA

Ursula Flossmann-Kraus, UEA

Lorraine Dongo, UEA

Jana Hofmann, UEA

Xian Li, UEA/SUSTech