Leiden Centre for Sustainability Governance
Affiliated faculty members
Meet our team
Academic staff
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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.
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Gus Greenstein is an Assistant Professor of Public Policy and Administration at the Leiden University Institute of Public Administration. He studies policy implementation and institutional change in the context of environmental/climate policy and international development. His work on policy implementation examines how organizational structure and management practice affect the outputs and performance of public agencies, and the factors that shape agency structure and management. His work on institutional change explores the drivers of environmental policy change in national/subnational governments and international development organizations. Gus’s completed and active projects address these themes in the context of deforestation control in Brazil, forest regulations (in global comparative perspective), and World Bank environmental policy, among other areas. He currently serves on the Steering Committee of the European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR) Standing Group on Environmental Politics and holds a PhD from Stanford University's Emmett Interdisciplinary Program in Environment and Resources.
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Eefje Cuppen is Professor of Governance of Sustainability at the Institute of Public Administration (Faculty of Governance and Global Affairs). Before joining Leiden University, Eefje Cuppen worked as Associate Professor at the Faculty of Technology, Policy and Management (TPM) of TU Delft. She holds an MSc degree in Innovation Sciences from Eindhoven University of Technology (2004) and a PhD in policy sciences from VU University (Institute for Environmental Studies; 2010).
Her research is situated in the broad field of governance of sustainability and innovation. Thematically, she currently concentrates on two lines: 1) public participation and decision-making for sustainable transformation, 2) design of multi-actor processes in sustainable transformation. -
Bas Nijboer is responsible for non-scientific and organizational support for a variety of programs and projects from the Institute of Public Administration. This covers among other things: partner recruitment, relationship management, project planning, budgeting, accountability, event organization. As Program & Project Manager, he is involved in the following UL programs:
- Furthering Public Leadership
- Equity in Energy Translation
- Governing Polarized Societies
- Liveable Planet & Sustainable Futures
