UNESCO-IHE Institute for Water Education
21 August 2016 (closing date)
The UNESCO-IHE Institute for Water Education offers graduate education in Delft, The Netherlands, and carries out research, innovation, and capacity development projects all over the world. The mission of UNESCO-IHE is to contribute to the education and training of professionals and to develop the capacity of sector organizations, knowledge centres and other institutions active in the fields of water, the environment and infrastructure in developing countries and countries in transition. Hence, the institute plays a key role in contributing to the Sustainable Development Goals agenda addressing local water challenges worldwide and with a focus on the Global South. UNESCO-IHE has a permanent staff of 180, of which 90 are scientific staff, while about 250 guestlecturers from academia and industry contribute to the educational programme. Each year 750 participants (incl. about 200 new MSc students per year) from all over the world attend the various regular and short courses at UNESCO-IHE. The Integrated Water Systems & Governance department covers a broad range of disciplinary knowledge – sociology, law, economics, public administration, political science, information technology, mathematics, hydrological and hydraulic modelling sciences, engineering, knowledge management and innovation studies. The department now offers a PhD fellowship, namely for a:
PhD on Citizen Science (Full Time)
Research focus & tasks
This PhD study is embedded in the Horizon 2020 project ‘Ground Truth 2.0 – Environmental knowledge discovery of human-sensed data’ (2016-2019). The project is undertaken by 14 partner organisations and aims to demonstrate and validate six scaled up citizen observatories in real operational conditions, in EU and Africa. Dr. Uta Wehn from UNESCO-IHE is the Project Director and will supervise this PhD study. The PhD study will focus on the (evolving) incentives and barriers for the stakeholders' involvement (which may differ considerably per demonstration case) and feed these insights into the project to update the stakeholder engagement strategy. For example, concerns about trust, privacy, accountability etc. among non-engaged parts of the population may be holding back the further up-scaling of the observatories. These leverage points can be addressed once identified. We offer a dynamic and challenging PhD fellowship in an international environment. The PhD fellow will have the unique opportunity to carry out action research on citizen science. The study will be challenging since it will be thoroughly embedded in the Ground Truth 2.0 project and therefore will need to feed into concrete project outputs at pre-determined and fixed dates.
More detailed information on UNESCO-IHE and our Programmes can be found at:
www.unesco-ihe.org
Details about admission can be found under the FAQ's and under Research or Education/PhD. Additional information can be obtained from Jolanda Boots, Admission and Fellowship Officer: j.boots@unesco-ihe.org Please note that we accept hardcopies only.
Applications in English can be sent until 21 August 2016 (closing date) to Jolanda Boots, Admission and Fellowship Officer by airmail/post.
