Hanna Sinare’s research focuses on pathways towards sustainable and just futures, combining participatory and interdisciplinary approaches in the contexts of biodiversity conservation, agriculture, food systems, and energy transitions, with a strong emphasis on the inclusion of local communities, youth, and multiple knowledge systems.

Sinare is currently working with the Become project (Biosphere reserves as Effective Conservation Measures). The project is exploring biosphere reserves as model areas to study governance approaches that aim to integrate conservation of biodiversity with sustainable economic and social development, specifically the role of inclusion and participation of local communities.

She is leading the Senegal case food systems group within the Santés Territoires project. This research-action project is led by the French research institute Cirad and is a collaboration with several academic and practitioner organisations in Senegal. With an integrative One Health approach, the project has established Living Labs to co-identify challenges and potential solutions, to experiment and evaluate solutions that support an agroecological transition.

Sinare also leads the policy analysis work in the Powering Change project. The project seeks to mobilise and weave different knowledges (i.e scientific, indigenous, traditional, artistic) about the consequences of wind energy development on indigenous territories, and for alternative just energy transitions.

Apart from her research, Hanna Sinare also leads the Resilience Thinking module within the SERSD programme, where students learn to apply resilience concepts to concrete cases.

Sinare’s previous work at SRC include research on youth perspectives on opportunities and constraints in agriculture and the wider rural economy in Burkina Faso, including a research stay at the Institut des Sciences des Sociétés in Ougadougou, Burkina Faso, and a visiting fellowship in the Rural Futures cluster at the Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex. Within the XPaths project, Sinare contributed to a multiscale participatory process on locally relevant pathways towards the SDGs in Senegal and led a study on distal impacts linking the case areas in dryland Brazil, Senegal and Spain to EU policies.

She holds a PhD in Natural Resources Management from SRC (2016). In her thesis, Benefits from ecosystem services in Sahelian village landscapes, she combined participatory methods in rural Burkina Faso with remote sensing to assess ecosystem services at village to provincial scales, and to estimate changes in the generation of ecosystem services since the 1950s. Sinare has an MSc degree in Soil and Water Management and a BSc degree in Biology from the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences.

Sinare is a member of the Society for Social-Ecological Systems (SocSES) and of the Forest, Climate & Livelihoods research network (Focali)

Awards and achievements:

• Member of the Scientific Committee for the Agri4D conference 2025
• Member of the Conference Committee for the Mande Studies Association (MANSA) conference 2021
  

Supervision:
Veronica Olofsson, PhD, co-supervisor
Emmi Ojansivu, MSc, main supervisor