Dr. Laura Mae Jacqueline Herzog

Research Interests

• Dynamics of social-ecological systems
• Influence of climate change and land use on aquatic ecosystem services
• Environmental governance & water management
• Collective action & cooperation
• Environmental conflicts & environmental policy problems
• Policy instruments & policy analysis
• Participatory processes & transdisciplinary co-design 
• Scenario development & transformative processes

Methods

• Social Network Analysis
• comparative case study analysis
• interviews & surveys
• participatory modelling

Profile

I'm a postdoctoral researcher interested in the different uses and the sustainable management of common-pool resources (CPR), specifically the CPR water. Within the LimnoScenES project, I am responsible for the case study of lake Dümmer and the scenario planning and stakeholder workshops therein.   

I received my PhD from the University of Bern where I was a research assistant at the Chair of Policy Analysis and Environmental Governance. There, I worked in an interdisciplinary research project (CrossWater) together with researchers from the Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology (Eawag) and the Luxembourg Institute of Socio-Economic Research (LISER). The project focused on the regulation and the extent of micro-pollutants in the river Rhine, combining concepts from policy analysis with mass flow analysis and perspectives from economic geography.

In my PhD research, I investigated cooperation among actors involved in the cause and the regulation of the common-pool resource (CPR) problem of micro-pollutants in the surface water of the river Rhine. I analyzed the cooperation networks of stakeholders in three sub-catchments of the Rhine: the Ruhr basin, the Moselle basin on Luxembourgian and German territory, and the Rhine catchment around the city of Basel. I found that at an early stage of CPR management, actors' perception of the CPR problem plays a crucial role for cooperation to start. At a later stage, once the CPR problem is known and measures to tackle it are under way, it's the institutional setting, more precisely actors' participation in forums, that consolidates cooperation between actors. Moreover, the intensity of information exchange and the density of cooperation among actors showed to be quite similar across the cases and across the different stages of CPR management.     

I gained my diploma in political science at the Otto-Suhr-Institut (OSI), Freie Universität Berlin, where I focused my research on CPR problems and environmental conflicts due to landgrabbing and mining, applied concepts of political ecology, and studied the concepts of human security and Responsibility to Protect (R2P) in post-war settings. In my diploma's thesis, I analyzed the local mobilization of social movements at two Peruvian mining sites, applying social movement theory.

Forschungsprojekte

LimnoScenES project