Claudia Sanchez Bajo, PhD in Development Studies (International Institute of Social Studies, Erasmus University, The Netherlands), was the Inaugural Chair in Cooperative Enterprises at the Faculty of Business and Economics of the University of Winnipeg, Canada between 2013 and 2015, where she developed 4 full courses and the complete future Concentration on Cooperative Enterprises within the Business Department. Her work currently focuses on non-profits, cooperative management and entrepreneurship and their role in social and economic development. She currently teaches at the Institute for Advanced Studies -IUSS- at Pavia University in Italy. Earlier, she taught at Kassel University in Germany, and earlier still, she concentrated her research on business actors in policy making, regionalism and globalisation, on the one hand, and parliaments and legislation on the other.
She currently is expert consultant for the ILO (Geneva). While in Canada, she was board member of the Canadian Association for Studies in Cooperation. She took part in the UN Expert Meeting in Nairobi in 2015 on Cooperatives. She worked on development projects for Genève Tiers Monde and is fluent in English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian. Co-author with Bruno Roelants of the book Capital and the Debt Trap: Learning from Cooperatives in the Global Crisis, 2013, Palgrave MacMillan. Other publications include The Political Economy of Regionalism – Business Actors in Mercosur in the Petrochemical and Steel Industrial Sectors in 2006 (Maastricht: Shaker Media, 2001). She contributed to, among others, The Political Economy of Regions and Regionalisms (Shaw, T, Boas, M, and Marchand, M. Ed, Palgrave, 2005) and Cooperative economics: Towards a socio-ecological economic paradigm edited by S. Novkovic, Zed Books, 2014.