Greetje Schouten is a senior researcher at the Partnerships Resource Centre (PrC) at the Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University in the Netherlands. Her research focuses on partnerships between NGOs, businesses and governments, mainly in the field of sustainable food and agriculture. Within this broad field she developed two main research lines.The first is on processes of legitimization of transnational standard-setting organizations and their relation to more localized governance arrangements, mainly in the global South. The second centres on the role of cross-sector partnerships in processes of inclusive development. A common denominator of these two research lines is a focus on the institutional fit between globally or internationally designed interventions and the diverse local realities in which these are implemented.
Within her research, Greetje aims to apply and advance qualitative methodologies, among which comparative configurational methodologies (e.g. QCA). Most of the research projects she is involved in have an explicit action research component and are conducted in close cooperation with practitioners. In 2013, Greetje successfully defended her doctoral thesis ‘Tabling Sustainable Commodities through Private Governance: Processes of Legitimization in the Roundtables on Sustainable Palm Oil and Responsible Soy’ at Utrecht University. Before joining the PrC Greetje worked as a postdoctoral researcher at Wageningen University.