Julia Tschersich is Junior Assistant Professor of Transformative Governance and Democracy at the Copernicus Institute of Sustainable Development at Utrecht University. She is engaged as co-convener of the ESG Working Group on Democracy.
Her main research interests include social-ecological transformation and their governance, ecological democracy and Seed Commons. She is passionate about better understanding the interplay of governance levels and scales in processes of social-ecological transformations, and ways to co-create more empowering structures to enhance democracy and justice in the governance of agri-food transitions.
Julia Tschersich obtained her cumulative PhD in the transdisciplinary research project RightSeeds at the University of Oldenburg. 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 on the global level. Moreover, she analyzed how these seed initiatives as ‘real utopias’ on the ground contribute to creating empowering institutions for a social-ecological transformation of agri-food systems.
During her PhD, she completed a research stay at the University of California, Santa Cruz, at the Environmental Studies Department. She obtained a Master degree in ‘Sustainability Economics and Management’ at the University of Oldenburg and a Bachelor degree in ‘International Relations’ at the Technical University of Dresden.