PhD Studentship

PhD project description:  

This PhD project is embedded within the GEOFORMATIONS project, an exciting multi-disciplinary project that examines transnational organisational assemblages and supporting governance processes designed to facilitate collaborative civil society action and engagement in development cooperation. 

Practices to achieve sustainable development objectives and respond to humanitarian needs are changing. With enhanced efforts to drive locally led and owned solutions, the size, scale, diversity, and density of non-governmental and civil society transnational collaborations and partnerships have increased substantially. However, little is known about the governance processes and ecosystems supporting this community of practitioners in the civic space. The ERC-funded GEOFORMATIONS project seeks to enhance the efficacy of governance processes supporting collaborative civic actions by examining how and why multi-partner arrangements form; the nature and structure of partnerships and power relations; how governance arrangements are evaluated in civic spaces; and the extent to which the voices of affected populations influence decision-making and strategic goals of collaborating partnerships.

This PhD project will focus on questions of how and why assemblages form and how they function and flow across institutions, scales, spaces and specific places. The project will focus on assemblages engaging in place-based practice and actions across the climate-humanitarian-development nexus.

GEOFORMATIONS:Geographies of dynamic governance assemblages in development cooperation civil society spacesproject description:

GEOFORMATIONS will provide radical new insights into the governance geographies of place-based development cooperation practices which can be used to radically redesign international development cooperation governance theory, policy, and practice. The project entails five core interconnected research objectives which, when synthesised together can unlock new thinking and ideas to inform in the transformation of development governance effectiveness, accountability, and coherence through enhanced, dynamic governances processes and structures within and between collaborating entities. The overarching aim of GEOFORMATIONS is to understand how governance processes and structures within and between civil society organisations can and should be understood, conceptualised, and operationalised in this age of complexity, interconnectivity, and uncertainty.

Please see job description and application procedure below