Melanie van Driel is a PhD candidate within the GlobalGoals project at the Copernicus Institute of Sustainable Development, Utrecht University, The Netherlands. Within the GlobalGoals project, she studies the steering effect of the Sustainable Development Goals at the global level. In this context, her focus is on the role that the Sustainable Development Goals might have in steering institutional coordination and integration.
The GlobalGoals project is exemplary of her broader interest in earth system governance in the Anthropocene, and especially in questions surrounding governance architecture and potential barriers or entry-points for transformation. Keywords here are fragmentation, polycentricity, International Organizations, institutional coordination, the UN System, integration, interlinkages, and interactions. She is also interested in questions surrounding the accountability and legitimacy of existing and potential governance arrangements.
In addition to her work for the project, Melanie works as a book review editor at the Journal of Comparative Sociology (Brill Publishers) and is an elected official for the Green Party at the Municipal Level in the Netherlands.
Before joining the Copernicus Institute of Sustainable Development she worked as a lecturer at the Faculty of Governance and Global Affairs (FGGA) at Leiden University. A Political Scientist by training, she earlier on specialized in International Relations – studying China, Central Eurasia, the MENA region and the Post-Soviet countries of Eastern Europe – and policy and governance at the University of Amsterdam, with a focus on the Political Economy of Energy.
Selected Publications:
Biermann, Frank, van Driel, Melanie, Vijge, Marjanneke J. & Peek, Tom
(2020). Governance Fragmentation. In Frank Biermann & Rakhyun E.
Kim (Eds.), Architectures of Earth System Governance – Institutional
Complexity and Structural Transformation (pp. 158-180) (23 p.).
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Vijge, Marjanneke J., Biermann, Frank, Kim, Rakhyun E., Bogers, Maya, Driel,
Melanie Van, Montesano, Francesco S., Yunita, Abbie & Kanie, Norichika
(2020). Governance through Global Goals. In Frank Biermann &
Rakhyun E. Kim (Eds.), Architectures of Earth System Governance –
Institutional Complexity and Structural Transformation (pp. 254-274)
(21 p.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
van Driel, M. (2020) Achieving the Sustainable Development Goals: Global
Governance Challenges edited by Simon Dalby, Susan Horton and Rianne
Mahon, with Diana Thomaz. Review in Environmental
Politics (FENP). Read.
Yunita, A.C., van Driel, M. & Vijge, M.J. (2019). Background paper: Review of
thematic (multi-) stakeholder networks – Prepared for the Annual General
Assembly of the Global Donor Platform for Rural Development. (42 p.).
Global Donor Platform for Rural Development.
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