PhD IN GOVERNANCE OF URBAN FOOD SYSTEM TRANSFORMATION

Europe's urban areas face significant challenges to ensure the availability and consumption of healthy, affordable, safe and sustainably produced food. The number of overweight or obese European citizens is rising at an alarming rate, resulting in a high incidence of diet-related health problems. Additionally, small-scale farmers, fishers and workers involved in harvesting and processing, continue to struggle to earn a living wage. Furthermore, current dietary patterns and the wider organization of the food system are associated with significant environmental challenges with negative effects on ecosystems and greenhouse gas emissions. These challenges converge within local food environments. Promising initiatives taken to change the architecture of food choice often fail to become embedded in the multi-level governance context and to reach deprived and vulnerable groups. Key factors responsible for this are siloed ways of working and fragmentation of empirical knowledge on facilitators of, and barriers to, transformation of urban food systems, which hinder the development and implementation of integrated urban food policies.

FOODCLIC, a large project funded by the European Commission, will address the above challenges. The project will create strong science-policy-practice interfaces across eight European city-regions of Barcelona, Spain; Berlin, Germany; Braşov, Romania; Budapest, Hungary; Aarhus, Denmark; Lisbon, Portugal; Amsterdam, Netherlands; and Lucca, Italy (in total 45 towns and cities). The backbone of such interfaces will be provided by Food Policy Networks, which will organise Living Labs to build a policy relevant evidence base through learning-in-action in real-life interventions. Capacity-building and direct support for intensive multi-stakeholder engagement will enable policy actors and urban planners across partner city-regions to develop continuously evolving integrated urban food policies and render planning frameworks food-sensitive.

Organization of the research trajectory

The Athena Institute within the Faculty of Science at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam is looking for a researcher interested in systems thinking, governance and methodological innovation in the fields of food system transformation, integrated food policy and multi-stakeholder engagement. As a PhD student, you will participate in cross-country activities of the FOODCLIC project: methodology development and capacity building to support the activities of the Food Policy Networks and the Living Labs. To assess progress and outcomes of project activities in the city-regions, you will be involved in the development and implementation of a reflexive monitoring and evaluation framework. Your research approach will be transdisciplinary (action research). You will work very closely with two other PhD students and junior and senior researchers of the Athena Institute, as well as with many interesting partners participating in this large EU-wide project. During the PhD program, you will also participate in teaching in bachelor and master courses, follow a PhD training programme (30 EC) and be offered opportunities for professional development.

Your duties

• Conducting methodologically innovative, transdisciplinary scientific research on the governance of urban food system transformation;
• Conducting a systematic literature review for theoretical and conceptual deepening;
• Designing your PhD research proposal within the framework of the FOODCLIC project in collaboration with your VU supervisors;
• Designing and training interactive methods, such as multistakeholder dialogue sessions aimed at problem articulation and the joint development of solutions, followed by concrete actions and their management;
• Providing methodological support to coordinators of the participating Food Policy Networks
• Writing Englishlanguage research articles that will be submitted to international scientific journals for peer-review and will culminate in a scientific dissertation;
• Writing Dutchlanguage, informative articles for policymakers on the results of the research;
• Teaching (up to 40% of the appointment) in the courses provided by the Athena Institute.