Project

Governance processes to enable circularity and cities resilience

MSc Thesis Vacancy

The construction sector is the world largest consumer of raw materials and responsible for 25 to 40% of the global GHG emissions. In the context of ongoing urbanization where the use of resources will grow, cities have a key role to play in the management of the waste of the building environment. The applying the principles of circular economy to the build environment appears to be a potential solution to reduce the emission CO2, decrease the environmental impact of a building, and limit the waste production and energy consumption. This ambition has been translated into policy strategies on various scales since 2015. Municipalities, as well as the stakeholders of the construction sector and urban planning, must work to implement this goal concretely. In that context, they need another way to work together and use new data and tools to support the decision process to enable circularity.

Description

This project aims to support urban transformation processes towards the circular economy by providing tools to evaluate material flow and governance arrangements on how to approach the circular economy transition. The project concerns five European countries (France, The Netherlands, Austria, Sweden, Romania) and we work together with three cities: Nijmegen (The Netherlands), Rennes Metropole (France) and Goteborg (Sweden). Field work in the partner cities may be possible in this project. At PAP, we are responsible for a work package of this project that concerns its governance issue. We have four main goals which could be inspiring for various thesis thematic:

  1. Identification of the use of existing decision support to achieve circularity in the built environment;
  2. Comparative study of the governance context enabling circularity for the three cases (existing rules and decision-making process);
  3. Identification of the stakeholder's involvement and collaborative/participation (best) practices to upscale;
  4. Design and test governance arrangement recommendations.

Necessary skills:

  • Qualitative methods;
  • Comparative methods, language: Dutch and/or French and/or Swedish;
  • Literature review;
  • Policy document analysis.