Dr. Vonintsoa Rafaly is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the WMU-Sasakawa Global Ocean Institute of the World Maritime University, Malmö, Sweden.

Her research interests revolve around rethinking ocean governance to better address global environmental challenges, examining both theoretical and practical perspectives, with a particular focus on analysing how norms, institutions, and legal processes yield distributional effects as they operate and evolve in different spatial and temporal conditions.

Before joining the Institute, Dr. Rafaly was a Postdoctoral fellow at the University of Gothenburg and the University of Copenhagen. She has extensive experience in marine environmental law. She has evolved in an interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary research setting, examining the intersection between ocean, biodiversity and climate change governance toward environmental stewardship and transformative governance. Her work was published in peer-reviewed international journals among which the Canadian Yearbook of International Law, the Yearbook of Polar Law and the Ocean Development and International Law.

She is engaged in teaching, both legal and interdisciplinary courses, in the areas of international law, law of the sea, environmental law, sustainable fisheries and international organisations in the maritime context.

She is a member of the scientific committee of the Annuaire de droit maritime et océanique and participates in several initiatives both at the national, regional and global level.