Personas

Joost Vervoort is an Assistant Professor in the Environmental Governance Group at the Copernicus Institute of Sustainable Development. He is also a Senior Researcher at the Environmental Change Institute, University of Oxford. An ecologist by training, Joost holds a PhD from Wageningen University in stakeholder engagement through scenarios and other approaches to sense-making in and navigating through complex systems.

For the last five years, Joost has led a team of researchers in a major multi-region scenarios project for the CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS) – where scenarios have been used effectively to guide policies throughout South and Southeast Asia, East and West Africa, the Andes, Central America and the Pacific. In addition, in Work Package leader roles in the FP7 TRANSMANGO and H2020 SUSFANS and programs, Vervoort has focused on scenarios and transition pathways in the context of European food and nutrition security.

A main current focus for Joost is the use of games and game co-design for understanding and planning in complex systems. How can the participatory designing of games help to conceive and frame current systems and their challenges, and future alternatives? Projects that reflect this focus include the Future Earth 'Bright Spots: Seeds of Good Anthropocene' project, a series of game jams for TRANSMANGO together with the Horizon 2020 project JamToday and Glasgow Caledonian University, and a BBSRC project on the resilience of fruit and vegetables in the UK and South Africa.

Joost is involved in the teaching of students in the Sustainable Development Science BSc program (Global Sustianability Challenges, Politics of the Earth) and the Sustainable Development Msc., as well as in the supervision of student research projects. Joost is supervising a number of PhD students at UU and at Oxford.