Dr Ana Bastida's scholarship maps out the role of law, policy, governance, and international cooperation in shaping global patterns of natural resources' extraction, and interrogates on the much-needed disciplinary, regulatory, and operational shifts for transformative change for sustainable and just futures. Her perspective is global, inasmuch as it looks at the intersection of natural resources law with the global economy, investment, environmental and human rights law, and at the interdependence of multilevel normative orders for understanding problems and possible pathways to solutions. A great focus of her work is on metals sourced for the global economy and on their national and local impacts. She has keen interest in the diversification of sources and epistemic communities and in the role of Higher Education for catalysing sustainability and transformation. 

Dr Bastida is currently the Programme Leader of the MSc in Sustainability, the flagship interdisciplinary programme that draws on expertise across the University campus.

She has long combined academic research on resources law and innovations in institutional design with strong engagement in technical reform and knowledge-exchange programmes and various epistemic communities.  She publishes in law, economics, and development journals and in a variety of formats.  

She has acted in expert advisory roles to governments (Argentina, Armenia, Côte d' Ivoire, Ecuador, El Salvador, Ethiopia, Georgia, Haiti, Mozambique, Mongolia), as well as intergovernmental organizations (IADB, UN, UNECA, IFC, World Bank, GIZ, DfID), companies (Anglo American, De Beers, YPF), non-governmental organisations (IUCN, RWI, Global Witness, Open Society Justice Initiative) and corporate institutions, regarding engagements in global governance as well as in jurisdictions as DRC, Indonesia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Romania, Montserrat and St Helena Islands, United Kingdom, South Africa.