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Dr. Laura Mae Jacqueline Herzog

I'm a postdoctoral researcher interested in the interactions of human and nature in so-called social-ecological systems, the influence of humans on ecosystems, and the question of how transformation processes towards sustainable resource use can succeed. I work predominantly inter- and transdisciplinary and focus on aquatic ecosystems.

I am member of the working group Resources Management

Publications

Scientific Outreach

Research Interests

Influence of land use practices and climate change on aquatic ecosystems
Dynamics of social-ecological systems
Environmental governance & water management
Participatory processes, scenario development & transformation pathways

Methods

Social Network Analysis
comparative case study analysis
interviews & surveys
participatory modelling
causal loop diagrams

Illustration of my research by Cristian Olmos Herrera

Profile

I conduct research on digitalization in the water sector of Lower Saxony as part of the Zukunftslabor Wasser. Previously, I assessed scenarios of lake management within the LimnoScenES project: I was responsible for the case study of lake Dümmer and the scenario planning and stakeholder workshops.

Currently, I am member of the scientific advisory board of two research projects: BaltAqua strives to advance cooperation by initiating a dialogue and building a Partner Network between German and Baltic actors in the water sector; the project "Participatory visioning for collective action in natural resource management" investigates the participatory visioning (PVB) approach and its implications for the (over)use of natural resources.

As a researcher interested in societal transformation and transdisciplinary research methods, I was member of the 3rd cohort of the PostDoc Academy for Transformational Leadership of the Robert Bosch Stiftung (2020-2022).

I received my PhD from the University of Bern where I was a research assistant at the Chair of Policy Analysis and Environmental Governance. During this time, 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. In my studies, I focused 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.