PhD position Landscape Governance

Are you a systems thinker passionate about bending the curve of biodiversity loss in agricultural landscapes? Are you looking for a meaningful research path with impact on the ground? Are you eager to join a stimulating environment, collaborate across academic fields, and engage with private and public actors? Are you enthusiastic to dive into effective planning and governance arrangements for biodiversity recovery in agricultural landscapes? Then, this PhD position might be the perfect fit for you.

Biodiversity recovery is essential to sustain resilient food systems, robust businesses, and healthy societies. A transition to a nature-inclusive dairy sector in the Netherlands is pivotal to biodiversity recovery, because of its influence in shaping landscapes through land use and management, and because of its socio-economic relevance. DECISION is a transdisciplinary project involving farmers, dairy companies, financial and service sectors, and local communities, to co-create and accelerate the transition to a resilient and nature-inclusive future. DECISION will count on a broad group of experts, four fully funded PhDs candidates and one postdoc.

For this position, we are looking for a PhD candidate eager to deal with the complexity of public and private governance efforts coming together in landscapes and at farm level, and the need to design coordinated action. In that role, you will build on and integrate the work of your fellow PhD candidates, co-develop a theory of change integrating coordinated public and private action and monitoring, explore synergies and tensions in multi-actor governance and planning, and help bridge research and education.

Your duties and responsibilities include:

• Develop a Research Proposal and a Training and Supervision Plan, to structure the 5-year project with a 0.8fte PhD trajectory
• Advancing conceptual thinking by linking and comparing business-to-business approaches with collective action and landscape governance
• Conducting and analyzing semi-structured interviews and workshops with stakeholders
• Implement a Theory of Change approach and other approaches for knowledge co-production with stakeholders
• Disseminate results by publishing papers in scientific journals, presenting in international conferences, and creating content items dedicated to stakeholders and students
• Work as a team player, contributing to the activities and wider aims of DECISION project.

You will work here
This PhD position will be situated between the Land Use Planning Group of Wageningen University & Research and the Animal Production Systems (APS) group. The LUP group aims to improve our understanding of landscapes as social-ecological systems and focuses on interventions that relieve the pressure on scarce space, improving the overall landscape quality. APS focuses on unravelling the complexity of livestock systems and exploring trade-offs and synergies of innovations regarding environmental impact, animal welfare, and economic viability to design a more sustainable future.

You will be supervised by Dr Judith Westerink (LUP) and Dr Raimon Ripoll-Bosch (APS). The work of Dr Judith Westerink focuses on transformative landscape governance, in particular related to biodiversity and dairy farming systems. The work of Dr Raimon Ripoll-Bosch focuses on understanding the complex interactions between livestock, nature (biodiversity and ecosystem services) and economy, to design enabling environments for the transitions to nature-inclusive agroecosystems.