Job openings for the UNICA-project

Join our multidisciplinary team!

The study of institutions for collective action/commons is highly interdisciplinary and many of the scientific insights incorporated in this project come from various disciplines of which some will be included in this research project. One of the underlying intentions of the UNICA-project is exactly to feed these insights from other disciplines, which usually only focus on a short period of time, into the historical, longitudinal study of the various archetypes of ICAs, and vice versa. We hope this can contribute also to enriching the perspectives of historians on how an ICA functions and which factors influence its resilience. From sociology we will integrate e.g. network analysis methods but we will also continue to work together with sociologists to analyse the regulation data that will be collected in Subprojects 3 and 4, as we already do now in the context of the currently running MIDI-project (collaboration between historians, sociologists, computational scientists and biologists). From resource governance studies we will use insights in archetype analysis (Subproject 1), and from micro-economics in particular behavioural economics insights will also be useful for Subprojects 3 and 4, to understand how group behaviour may change when types and size of resources and members within an ICA change over time. In the UNICA-project, the search for resilience by balancing resources, users and institution, will be different from case to case, depending on the local circumstances, and over time. Whereas in many cases interdisciplinary research by historians comes down to historians integrating methods of other social sciences into historiographical research, the UNICA-project has the ambition to turn this around and demonstrate to other social sciences the need for and value of a long-term, historical perspective, beyond the anecdotal. Given the slow changes that characterise institutions in general, but also the delay in visible impacts of long-standing negative or positive natural resource use and management may have, a “longitudinal approach” is essential to understand how ICAs function; over time, a multitude of institutional arrangements for natural resource management have emerged to tackle numerous changes in economy and society. Comparative analysis over space and time is needed to identify the variety in these arrangements and the mechanisms behind them.

Currently, UNICA has one open PhD-position:

PhD-position on Institutions for Collective Action (focus on fishing collectivities)

Check here for the current composition of our interdisciplinary research team.