Dr M. Kaufmann (Maria)

Maria Kaufmann, PhD, is a researcher at the Chair Group of Political Sciences of the Environment at Radboud University Nijmegen. Maria’s research experience focuses on environmental governance, particularly climate adaptation (e.g. flood risk governance, water resource management) and climate mitigation/ energy transition. She advanced two main research lines: analysing transformations, particularly discursive- institutional dynamics (stability and change) and evaluating governance arrangements in terms of environmental justice (distributional, recognition, and procedural justice).

Her research has been published in top multidisciplinary journals, such as Global Environmental Change, Regional Environmental Change, Journal of Environmental Management, Land Use Policy, or Ecology and Society.

From 2013 to 2017 Maria contributed as a junior researcher to the EU FP7-funded project “STARFLOOD” (“Strengthening And Redesigning European flood risk practices”). Within the project she carried out her PhD research, in which she compared and explained varieties in flood risk governance between countries and analyzed institutional dynamics of these arrangements.

Previously, Maria has been a visiting research fellow and guest lecturer at the Institut Teknologi Sepuluh Nopember, Surabaya, Indonesia (2018); a visiting research fellow at the Flood Hazard Research Centre at Middlesex University (2015) and at the Fenner School of Environment and Society at the Australian National University (2012).

Maria holds a PhD degree in Management Sciences/ Environmental Politics from Radboud University; and a Master degree (cum laude) in Environmental Sciences and Transnational Ecosystem-based Water Management, a double degree program from Radboud University, the Netherlands, and University Duisburg/ Essen, Germany.

• climate change adaptation, governance, justice, qualitative comparative research,

• Political Sciences of the Environment