Susan Baker (born 9 October 1955) is a Professor Emerita in the School of Social Sciences and former co-director of the Sustainable Places Research Institute at Cardiff University.
After completing an MA and working in the United States and Galway, she won a government scholarship to study for a PhD in political science at the European University Institute (EUI) in Florence.
[3] Baker completed her PhD thesis, on "Dependency, ideology and the industrial policy of Fianna Fail in Ireland, 1958–1972", in 1987, and it was examined by Philippe Schmitter, Paul Bew, Jean Blondel and James Wickam.
[3][5] Baker became the first woman to be appointed to a King Carl XVI Gustaf Professorship in Environmental Science in 2003, spending the 2003–04 academic year visiting Umeå University while she held the award.
[8][9] Baker co-edited the book In Pursuit of Sustainable Development: New Governance Practices at the Sub-national Level in Europe (Routledge, 2008) with Katarina Eckerberg,[10] and is the author of Sustainable Development, which is part of the Routledge Introductions to Environment Series and was published in its second edition in 2015.