The research group Governance, Participation and Sustainability is based at Leuphana University, Lüneburg (Germany), and led by Professor Jens Newig. We are a multidisciplinary team with backgrounds from political science, geography, sociology, systems science, or environmental sciences. We are affiliated with Leuphana’s Faculty of Sustainability and the Center for the Study of Democracy.

Our research centers around the big challenges of governance in the context of environmental and sustainability politics. Politics and policy on multiple levels, from the very local to the global, working across scales, and involving a variety of stakeholders and process forms, from top-down policy implementation to processes of social learning in collaborative networks form the center of investigation. We ask whether and how participation and collaboration foster environmental sustainability? How can sustainability transitions be governed? How to meet the challenges of governing global social-ecological teleconnected systems? We use in-depth case studies as well as large-N case survey meta analysis to improve the evidence-base of sustainability governance.

Current themes of investigation:

• Global environmental governance → GOVERNECT project  → COUPLED project
  
• Water policy and governance → EDGE project  → GoScaLE project → NEWAVE project
• Agriculture and food → Leverage Points project → MULTAGRI project
• Energy → Leverage Points project
• Participation and collaborative governance → EDGE project
• Multi-level governance →MULTAGRI project → GoScaLE project
• Evidence-based governance → EDGE project
• Democratic legitimacy → EDGE project  → GoScaLE project
• Large-N comparative meta analysis / case survey → EDGE project
• Sustainability Transitions → Leverage Points project
• Systems approaches to governance → Leverage Points project
• Transdisciplinarity → MONA project
• Telecoupling → GOVERNECT project → COUPLED project