Are you attracted by a socio-political analysis of actors and their choices regarding the techno-economic and governance aspects of infrastructures for sustainable energy systems?
Do you have affinity with design thinking and its application to transformative, contested change?
Are you a person who can do academically interesting research, embedded in stakeholder engagement in an interdisciplinary setting?
Are you interested in the energy transition as a multi-scale (local, provincial, national and transnational) phenomenon?
The
Department Political Science of the faculty is looking for a PhD student for a project on the energy transition in the province of North-Holland.
This Province of North Holland needs support in designing a novel, flexible and hybrid energy infrastructure that is able to accommodate social-economic functions while simultaneously implementing, and speeding up, the energy transition. As explained here this poses significant coordination challenges between different regions, as well as between actors, practices, institutions and infrastructures at the regional, provincial, national and (trans-)national level.
This project is to analyze governance dilemmas and explore opportunities to deal with them. It will involve desk research, iteratively embedded in a process of stakeholder engagement. The PhD student will help shape that process.
The PhD candidate will be embedded in the Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research (
AISSR) at the Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences. More specifically, the PhD will be part of the AISSR programme group
Transnational Configurations, Conflict and Governance. Senior staff from the faculties of
Economics and Business and
Law will contribute their expertise on the business, economic and legal issues, and participate in supervision. There will be collaboration with energy researchers from all UvA faculties in the context of the UvA Institute of Advanced Studies.
What are you going to doAs a first step, the PhD student will map existing plans with a focus on the supposed infrastructure, and explore its system efficiency (economic, energetic and infrastructural), land use, and public support ramifications. On that basis key challenges for the province's energy transition and its governance will be identified, and some well-delineated cases will be defined that enables further exploration of these issues. For these cases, solution alternatives will be elaborated and evaluated, using design methodology and (qualitative) complex systems thinking. This process will be embedded in structured interaction (mostly in Dutch) with policy makers and other stakeholders.
Some background information may be found
here.
You will/tasks:
- do desk research, interviews and field visits to map the existing and emerging energy infrastructure in the province of North Holland;
- use design methods to elaborate and evaluate alternative options for the energy infrastructure;
- help set up and run a structured process of involvement of policy makers and stakeholders, and embed one's own research in this process
- write a PhD dissertation in English, including four articles based on the above, to be published in international, refereed academic journals.
- participate in meetings with a wider (IAS) community of the UvA energy researchers.