News

Sarah Olbrich participated at the Beyond crisis/Beyond normal in Trondheim, Norway in September, 2023 with a presentation on "Policy Mix for energy sector integration in Germany - Challenges and Strategies". The conference explored aspects of sustainability across everyday life, politics, technology, art, and innovation through a broad range of disciplinary and cross-disciplinary perspectives.

Find the link to the Conference here.

Master of Commerce graduate (Stellenbosch) Verena van Zyl-Bulitta continues her PhD studies, which she started at the University of Leipzig, now at the Chair of Sustainability and Transformation Research. Her research focuses on social-ecological and socio-technical aspects of energy transitions across the Global North-South divide. She investigates how allocation of responsibilities for flexibilization, commons governance mechanisms and the role of the co-prosumer could be framed from a commoning perspective. In her research she uses energy and flexibility justice concepts as well as political economic approaches.

On June 26, 2023, the Schader Foundation and Darmstadt University of Applied Sciences invite you to the symposium "Transdisciplinary Research: Review and Perspectives" at the Schader Forum. The event takes the retirement of Dr. Bettina Brohmann (Öko-Institut e.V.) as an opportunity to take stock and look ahead: What insights can be gained from the experiences of the past decades? What are the prospects for the role of science in processes of social change? What does this mean for the future funding landscape?

Dierk Bauknecht will participate in the roundtable discussion "Establishing New Cultures and Practices of Scientific Collaboration - In 25 Years from Shaping Sustainable Transformation to the ITD Alliance".

More information on the event can be found on the Schader Foundation's website.

In May, Sarah Olbrich participated in a workshop on transformation research called "Exploring multi-system phenomena in net-zero transitions". The workshop was organized by Allan Dahl Andersen, Karoline Rogge and Frank Geels.

The interaction of different socio-technical systems (multi-system interaction) plays a central role in the decarbonization of the respective systems, such as mobility, buildings or heating. This multisystem interaction and the potential synergies that result from such interaction are of high importance for reaching greenhouse gas neutrality.

Within sustainability transformation research, there is already a small but growing branch of research on multisystem interactions that investigates the complexity of multisystem interactions. Although this research branch already offers relevant insights, cross-system research on transformations remains expandable. Therefore, the goal of the workshop was to gain a deeper understanding of multisystem interactions, strengthen the academic community on multisystem phenomena in sustainability transformations, and develop a new research agenda for multisystem transformations.

The Chair of Sustainability and Transformation Research is represented at the IST conference "International Sustainabitily Transitions" (IST). Our two contributions include a full paper contribution by Sarah Olbrich "Policy Mix for energy sector integration in Germany - Challenges and Strategies" and a speed talk by Caterina Pacini "Addressing the challenges of system building: an overview of strategies to deal with new lock-in and path dependencies in the transition process".

This year's conference theme is "Responsibility and reflexivity in transitions". For more information on our contributions can be found here: Sarah Olbrich and Caterina Pacini.