Claudia Pahl-Wostl

Claudia Pahl-Wostl is full professor for resources management at the Institute for Environmental Systems Research (USF) in Osnabrück, Germany. She is an internationally leading scholar on governance and adaptive and integrated management of water resources and the role of social and societal learning. Her research programme builds on foundations in systems science, which explicitly acknowledge the complex and often unpredictable dynamics of the systems to be managed. In 2012 the Bode Foundation Water Management Prize was awarded to Prof. Pahl-Wostl for the pioneering interdisciplinary work on “Governance in times of change” and comparative analyses of water governance in large river basins.

Recent research interests include the water-energy-food nexus and SDG implementation and social-ecological-network analysis.

Main research interests

• Adaptive governance and management of environmental resources
• Social and societal learning and their role in transformation processes towards sustainability
• Global water governance in a multi-level governance system
• Conceptual and methodological frameworks to analyse social-ecological systems.

Recent scientific publications

• The Role of Governance Modes and Meta-Governance in the Transformation towards Sustainable Water Governance
• Governance of the water-energy-food security nexus: A multi-level coordination challenge
• The capacity of water governance to deal with the climate change adaptation challenge: using fsQCA to distinguish between polycentric, fragmented and centralized regimes

Recent special Issues

• The Nexus of Water, Energy and Food - an Environmental Governance Perspective
• Global Water Governance: Challenges and Future Scope
• Water in the Anthropocene: New Perspectives for Global Sustainability
• Responses to environmental and societal challenges for our unsustainable earth 

Teaching

• Adaptive Management
• Participatory modelling 
• Environmental risk analysis and governance
• Actor based and social network analysis
• Complex Adaptive Systems
• Rule based modelling 
• Adaptive Governance and Political Steering