Dr. Aysem Mert

Ayşem Mert is Lecturer at the Department of Political Science, Stockholm University. At the department her responsibilities include directing the International Masters Programme In Social Science Environmental Studies (IMPRESS), teaching environmental politics and governance courses at all levels, and doing research. Her expertise is on discourses of democracy and environment at transnational and global levels, public-private cooperation in environmental governance, sustainability partnerships, and the Anthropocene. She employs psychoanalytic and interpretive methods, especially political discourse theory and critical fantasy studies, collaborates with artists and stakeholders in transdisciplinary projects, and draws on political theory and philosophy to better understand global governance institutions and contemporary perceptions of naturecultures. Her current projects focuses on environmental governance after the pandemic, and climate adaptation in communities that survive wildfires.

Ayşem holds a PhD in global environmental governance (2012, VU Amsterdam), and master’s degrees in environmental studies (2005, Boğaziçi University) and IR (2002, International University of Japan). Before she joined the department in 2017, she worked as a post-doctoral researcher at Centre for Global Cooperation Research (Germany) and Amsterdam Global Change Institute (The Netherlands), and as faculty at the Institute for Environmental Studies, VU University Amsterdam and Institute for Environmental Social Sciences and Geography, Freiburg University.

Ayşem is the author of Environmental Governance through Partnerships: A discourse theoretical study (2015, Edward Elgar) and co-edited Public–Private Partnerships for Sustainable Development (Pattberg et al. 2012), and the Handbook of Global Politics in the 22nd Century (Horn et al. 2023). She published several peer-reviewed and popular scientific articles in English, Turkish, and Dutch. She has been the co-/editor of Earth System Governance Working Papers, and Üç Ekoloji (Three Ecologies), and serves in the editorial boards of International Environmental Agreements: Politics, Law and Economics (INEA) and Earth System Governance journals.