Centre for Governance of Sustainability
Team
meet our staff
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Eefje is Professor in Governance of Sustainability at the Institute of Public Administration of the Faculty of Governance & Global Affairs of Leiden University. She is part of the core team of Leiden’s Liveable Planet program. She is involved in the MSc Governance of Sustainability, which is a joint program of the Institute of Public Administration and the Institute of Environmental Sciences (CML), geared towards educating change agents for sustainability. Eefje’s research is situated on the interface between policy, innovation and society, with a focus on stakeholder participation and societal conflict in sustainability transitions. Her research concentrates in two lines: the analysis of (participatory) decision-making processes, and the design of participatory decision-making.
She works across boundaries, with different disciplines and with public and private parties. She published widely on design and methodology of stakeholder dialogue, public engagement and controversy in energy planning, responsible innovation, and governance of sustainability transitions.
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Gerard Breeman is an Assistant Professor at the Institute of Public Administration (Leiden University). His research focuses on agenda-setting and policy change in the policy domains of sustainability. In this line of research, he looks at the social mechanisms that explain the political and media attention for policy topics and the role of stakeholders during policy making. His work includes research on building and losing trust between public institutions and citizens during sustainable transition processes. This contains also the study of wicked sustainability problems, such as energy transition, nitrate surpluses, construction of mega stables in rural areas, and the reform of the common agricultural policy of the European Union. His work has been published in journals, such as Administration & Society, Food Policy, Comparative Political Studies, Climate Change Governance, Food Security, and the Journal of European Public Policy.
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Shivant Jhagroe is an Assistant Professor at the Institute of Public Administration. His current research focusses on human/non-human relations in politics and policy, mainly in the fields of ecology and (digital) technology. He is particularly interested in shifting socio-material regimes and practices, and related questions of governing, knowledge, power and inequality. With his research, he seeks to develop policy-relevant perspectives towards more sustainable, democratic and just futures. His current teaching activities revolve around climate governance, the energy transition and sustainable urbanism.
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Elena Bondarouk is an Assistant Professor at the Institute of Public Administration. Her research focuses on the drivers for the differentiated implementation of EU environmental policy. She examines how participatory and multi-level governance impacts implementation performance and goal attainment at local level. She is particularly interested in natural experiments where different policy arrangements produce different outcomes. The dynamic behind these differences ignites her research curiosity. She has supervised a variety of different environmental policy theses, ranging from urban-nature based solutions, air quality, renewable energy, circular textile industry, agriculture to plastic pollution. Her teaching activities revolve around circular economy, policy analysis, agenda-setting and implementation.
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Antonella Maiello is Assistant Professor of Governance of Sustainability.
Her research concerns collaborative governance in the different realms of sustainability – water, waste and energy - with attention to the underpinning ethical and political dilemmas. Within this research field, she focuses on community and commons-based approaches to address sustainability challenges in the provision of public service. She is especially interested in studying the potential of local/place-based experiments in triggering necessary institutional changes. At this aim, her current work revolves around the use of socio-spatial relations, i.e., network and embedding power dynamics and scaling across different levels of governance, as lenses to explore the role of old and new institutional actors (e.g., parties, cooperatives, consortia, intermediary/boundary organizations, advocacy coalitions) in building a sustainable future(s).
Areas of interest: political ecology, critical theory, collaborative governance, community-based approaches, institutional analysis, public values.
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Carola van Eijk is an Assistant Professor at the Institute of Public Administration. Her research focuses on co-production and citizen participation processes that are directed at the delivery of various kinds of public services. In this line of research, she looks at the interaction between citizens and public officials, and the challenges this collaboration poses for the professionals involved. Her recent work revolves around the conflicting interests public officials can be confronted with and how they deal with these conflicts.
Areas of interest: co-production, citizen participation, policy implementation, public service delivery, local government, livability, inclusiveness.
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Sarah Giest is an Associate Professor at the Institute of Public Administration (Leiden University). Her research focuses on public innovation processes and data use within government. In this line of research, she looks at the role of data and the decisions of individuals handling this data at different points in the public decision-making process and in policy implementation. Her work includes research on utilizing data-driven technologies for sustainability. This contains emerging dynamics of accountability in data-driven urban climate change governance as well as the role of data in making cities more sustainable in their policy approach towards carbon emissions and energy consumption. Her work has been published in journals, such as Energy Policy, Environmental Science & Policy, Nature Climate Change, and Regional Environmental Change and has been explored with government partners.
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Natascha van der Zwan is an Associate Professor at the Institute of Public Administration. Her research focuses on the politics of financial investment, particularly the question of how the capital managed by large institutional investors like pension funds can be mobilized for the sustainable transition. In other research, she has focused on the political interdependencies between the financial system and the welfare state. Natascha’s work has been published in journals such as Journal of European Public Policy, Journal of European Social Policy, New Political Economy and Socio-Economic Review. Natascha is the co-PI of an international consortium project on sustainable investment by pension funds (funded by the Hans-Böckler-Stiftung) and a NORFACE-funded project on the democratic governance of occupational pension schemes. She also regularly presents her work on sustainable finance and pension investment to policymakers and members of the public.
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Lars Dorren is an assistant professor at the Institute of Public Administration (Leiden University), interested in knowledge use in processes of reasoning and decision-making. As an ethnographer, Lars approaches reasoning as a dynamic group activity; a spontaneous practice in which individuals rely on intuition and impulses as much as logic and reason. In this practice, knowledge plays a myriad of roles, from a provider of political ammunition to a device for therapeutic reflection. Lars’ research aims to understand these roles and assess their impact on policy processes by drawing on rich empirical accounts of the micro-interactions between individuals that constitute a policy process, as well as philosophical theory on the nature of knowledge and legitimacy.
