Research of Environmental Policy

The terrestrial themes of our research span both urban and rural areas. It focuses on energy and food transitions in cities, as well as the implications of large-scale tree plantations and the water-energy-food nexus across urban-rural regions.

The marine environment encompasses seas and oceans and coastal regions. Our research focuses on sustainable fisheries and aquaculture, deep sea mining, offshore energy, clean shipping, and marine conservation and restoration.

The atmospheric environment encompasses the earth-space interface. We research the mitigation of climate warming gasses through different approach to environmental governance as well as critical perspectives on geoengineering

We examine the connections and contradictions in current environmental regime-making. Environmental regimes refers to the formal and informal rules, norms, principles, institutional architectures, technologies, and networks that emerge and evolve to govern multi-scalar environmental and sustainability challenges.

We develop concepts and methods to examine how regimes affect effective and equitable environmental sustainability outcomes. In doing so, we contribute to identifying and understanding the transformative potential of regimes in environmental sustainability governance.

Questions we ask

• How are environmental regimes and world orders being reshaped in the face of such instability?
• What does this mean for environmental governance, including for dimensions of effectiveness, equity, transparency, and anticipation?
• And in what ways can environmental regimes be transformed to be strengthened on these dimensions?

We examine how technologies, as part of socio-material practices and regimes, mediate and influence how we interpret and govern environmental challenges. Technologies include apps, platforms, urban infrastructures, AI, and Digital Twins, but also emergent eco- or climate-technologies such as geo-engineering, large-scale tree planting, and reef restoration technologies.

We develop knowledge and methods that contribute to reflexive forms of sustainability governance through and of technologies. Reflexive means anticipating and responding to the various environmental and societal effects of technologies for sustainability, with the aim of creating sustainable and equitable outcomes.

Questions we ask

• How do technologies for sustainability shape what gets governed, how, and by whom, and what are the socio-political and environmental implications?
• How do public and private actors interpret and address the (sustainability) risks of new and emergent technologies, and what approaches are developed to govern these risks?

We focus on social practices, as opposed to structures or individuals, to study sustainability transformations and environmental governance. We consider practices as the basis of social life, which means understanding human action in dynamic socio-material contexts as interconnected embodied routines.

We further use practice-based approaches which can inform efforts focused on designing social interventions towards sustainability in ways that can support already existing, and sometimes latent, sustainable practices in everyday life. We do this by embedding energy, food, water and mobility practices in a wider systems' perspective. By doing so, we explore how social relations and norms of environmental change affect everyday practices, and how future imaginaries of new practices can design such changes in the present.

Questions we ask

• How can the routinised nature of practices explain the lock-in effects of socio-technical systems transformations, and what are ways to overcome such lock-ins to improve sustainability?
• What are the socially differentiated implications of policies aimed at steering sustainability transformations in food, water, energy, and mobility domains within and across societies and time periods?

We examine the multiple and uneven relations between environmental mobilities and governance. A mobilities' lens helps to understand and capture environmental issues that move, change form, and fluctuate and whose governance is not (yet) institutionalized.

We develop a conceptual and methodological approach for understanding environmental mobilities, via which we study (the implications of) environmental change and its governance from the perspective of movement. We pay particular attention to the equitability and sustainability of the practices, technologies, and regimes that govern environmental mobilities, such as migration, tourism and plastic flows.

Questions we ask

• How do environmental mobilities shape what gets governed, how, and by whom, and what are the socio-political and environmental implications?
• What practices, technologies, or governance regimes shape these environmental mobilities and with what impact on those involved?