PhD Candidate: Governing the Acceleration of the Transition to Animal-Free Safety Assessment

The transition to animal-free safety assessment needs to accelerate. While our understanding of transitions and societal transformations is growing, the question of how to govern the acceleration of such transitions receives less attention. Do you want to contribute to the transition to animal-free safety assessment, and enhance our understanding of governing the acceleration of societal transformations more generally?

The Chair Group of Environmental Governance and Politics (EGP) at the Nijmegen School of Management, Radboud University, is looking for a PhD candidate. You will be part of the transdisciplinary consortium working on the project ’Accelerating the transition to animal-free Next Generation Risk Assessment (NGRA): A transformative governance approach’, funded as part of the Dutch Research Agenda (NWA). The aim of this research project is to contribute to the acceleration of the transition to animal-free safety assessment for chemicals and pharmaceuticals in the EU, including the Netherlands, and the USA. To achieve this aim, the consortium applies a transformative governance approach.

The consortium will experiment with transformative governance approaches to accelerate the transition through action research. As PhD candidate, you will play a central role in the project, working together with a postdoctoral researcher (also based at Radboud University), and another PhD candidate (based at Utrecht University). A central part of your PhD project comprises action research, applying a transformative governance approach, in order to gain experience with governing the acceleration of the transition to animal-free safety assessment. The research conducted by the postdoctoral researcher and other PhD candidate will feed into this action research, in which the entire consortium will collaborate.

We are looking for a colleague who is passionate about animal and sustainability issues - a researcher who wants to make a difference. We are looking for someone who can make connections across disciplines and among a variety of societal actors, and has excellent organisational skills.