Robbert Biesbroek appointed as new Assistant Professor on Environmental Governance

On 1 November Robbert Biesbroek was appointed as Assistant Professor in the field Environmental Governance at the Public Administration and Policy (PAP) group. His research will focus particularly on the social mechanisms for intentional policy change in controversial environmental issues that transcend existing policy regimes, including issues such as climate change adaptation, food security and sustainable agriculture.

Robbert worked previously as PhD candidate on the challenges in the governance of climate change adaptation at the Earth System Science group and also the Public Administration and Policy group at Wageningen UR. His research, funded by the Dutch national research program “Climate changes spatial planning”, demonstrates the challenges that barriers to adaptation pose in developing and implementing climate change adaptation strategies, discusses the need to challenge these barriers to adaptation by identifying intervention strategies, and challenges the concept of barriers to adaptation by proposing a mechanismic perspective to explain why adaptation proves challenging. In his cumulative research he used a mixture of qualitative and quantitative methods to study the challenges on adaptation at national and local levels.

In addition to conducting his PhD, Robbert worked on several projects related to the governance of climate change adaptation, for example the “Knowledge for Climate” program, the “Partnership for European Environmental Research” network and the “Delta `Program”. He is recently involved in the European Topic Centre project on national climate change adaptation policies in EEA member countries.

We warmly welcome Robbert and wish him luck with his career.