The central training objective is to give 9 doctoral fellows and 3 post-doctoral fellows an interdisciplinary training
- in research on environmental governance, particularly of biodiversity and water, in Europe, and
- in designing legitimate and effective solutions for participation and communication between policy makers, scientists and the public.
GoverNat trains researchers to examine political processes, actors and arenas, to analyse the transaction costs associated with different institutional settings, to improve the implementation of European and national regulations, to develop legitimate structures of good governance, and to design science/policy interfaces, which integrate scientific results into decision processes. This training program brings together knowledge from different fields in a novel way and requires communication skills beyond monodisciplinary exchange. It is designed to assist in digesting the disciplinary, institutional, and cultural/geographic diversity. Doctoral and post-doctoral fellows leaving the GoverNat should be able to:
- develop practically relevant structures of good environmental governance as a result of acquiring interdisciplinary and intersectorial knowledge in two fields of governance;
- transfer their acquired knowledge through interdisciplinary and intersectorial communication to other complex fields of practice and research.
These objectives will be achieved through a training program consisting of a combination of network-wide and individual measures. The program uses innovative methods and approaches specifically designed to develop communication skills, while focussing on substantive project requirements. Fellows should ideally have an interdisciplinary background in social sciences. GoverNat aims at a mix of research questions and fellow backgrounds corresponding to the expertise of the consortium partners.