Katja Hujo is Senior Research Coordinator in the Social Policy and Development Programme of UNRISD and member of the Institute’s Senior Management Group. She is coordinator and lead author of the latest UNRISD flagship report “
Policy Innovations for Transformative Change – Implementing the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development” and organized the UNRISD 2018 Call for Paper Conference on
“Overcoming Inequalities in a Fractured World: Between Elite Power and Social Mobilization”.
Katja’s academic work focuses on social policy, poverty and inequality, socio-economic development, and the sustainability transition. Much of her research is at the interface of economics and politics, for example her research on the political economy of pension reform, social protection and poverty reduction, social policy in mineral-rich contexts, the politics of domestic resource mobilization for social development, or more recently on the political drivers of inequality.
Katja joined UNRISD in 2006. Before, she was a research fellow and lecturer at the Latin American Institute at Free University Berlin (FUB). She studied economics (Diplom-Volkswirtschaft) and political science (MA) at Eberhard-Karls-University Tübingen, Freie Universität Berlin (FUB) and National University of Córdoba, Argentina, and holds a doctoral degree in economics from FUB. In 2004, she was visiting fellow at CIEPP (Centro Interdisciplinario para los Estudios de las Políticas Públicas), Buenos Aires.
Katja is currently managing research projects on Overcoming Inequalities in a Fractured World; Universities and Social Inequalities in the Global South; VoiceIT: Strengthening LGBTQI+ Voices in Politics; Integrated Solutions to Protracted Displacement, and is partner in a global research hub on South-South Migration, Inequality and Development. She has published numerous articles, one monograph, nine edited volumes and three special journal issues. She is co-organizer of five editions of the World Social Work Day at the UN in Geneva from 2017-21. She is co-editor of the blog Series Overcoming Inequalities, of a special issue with the International Social Security Review (ISSR) on “The Human Right to Social Security” (December 2017), and has recently published The Politics of Domestic Resource Mobilization for Social Development, with Palgrave Macmillan in July 2020.
Specialization:
Social policy / Social security and pension reform / Socio-economic development / Poverty and Inequality / Migration