Dr. Julia Tschersich

Julia Tschersich is Assistant Professor of Transformative Governance and Democracy at the Copernicus Institute of Sustainable Development at Utrecht University. She is a research fellow of the global Earth System Governance network and co-convener of its working group on Democracy.

Her research focuses on democracy and justice for the governance of social-ecological transformations, esp. food governance, radical and ecological democracy, community-based initiatives, social movements, and Seed Commons. Her research highlights deep leverage points for sustainability transformation, hence challenging dominant unsustainable discourses and paradigms, such as a growth focus, human-nature dichotomies, and focus on expert, technocratic knowledge; and reveals incumbent power relations embedded in dominant institutions and practices. Her research aims to shine light on and empower the many already lived, prefigurative ‘real utopias’ on the ground, and understand conditions for them to achieve wider transformative impact. For this, she is passionate about better understanding the interplay of governance levels and scales in processes of transformations, hence how bottom-up grassroots relate to top-down structures, and ways to co-create more empowering narratives, institutions and practices. This includes alternative forms of achieving pluralistic, democratic directionality towards just and sustainable transformations. She takes a transformative and transdisciplinary research approach to incorporate pluralist voices and types of knowledge in my research, including Global South and Indigenous perspectives.

She obtained her PhD in the transdisciplinary research project RightSeeds at the University of Oldenburg, Germany. Her dissertation examined how Seed Commons initiatives are affected by the complex Multi-Level Governance system around plant genetic resources, biodiversity, intellectual property rights, and seed legislation in Germany and the Philippines, and at the EU and the global level. She analyzed how these seed initiatives as ‘real utopias’ on the ground and as social movements contribute to creating more empowering institutions and practices for a social-ecological transformation of agri-food systems.