We are a multidisciplinary team with backgrounds from political science, geography, sociology, systems science, or environmental sciences. Our research centers around the big challenges of governance in the context of environmental and sustainability politics. Politics and policy on multiple levels, from the very local to the global, working across scales, and involving a variety of stakeholders and process forms, from top-down policy implementation to processes of social learning in collaborative networks form the center of investigation. We ask whether and how participation and collaboration foster environmental sustainability? How can sustainability transitions be governed? How to meet the challenges of governing global social-ecological teleconnected systems? We use in-depth case studies as well as large-N case survey meta-analysis to improve the evidence-base of sustainability governance. Much of our research is inter- and transdisciplinary in nature, involving stakeholders from outside academia.

• The effectiveness of participation in environmental decision-making processes
• Collective leraning and social network analysis
• Environmental and sustainability conflicts: mediation and consensus building
• Issues of complexity and uncertainty os sustainability
• Environmental information: monitoring and evaluation
• Global and multi-level governance and institutional scaling processes
• Public discourse and the role of the media
• Transformation and decay of social-ecological systems
• water resources management, coastal protection and management, land use and reuse of brownfield sites.