Marie Curie Early Stage Researcher in Transforming Phosphorus Governance

Marie Curie Early Stage Researcher in Transforming Phosphorus Governance:

We are inviting applications to the Marie Curie Innovative Training Network RECAP: Capture, recycling and societal management of phosphorus in the environment.

RecaP will train a novel type of Phosphorus specialist with the capacity to investigate transformative pathways to address the Global Phosphorus Challenge (GPC) in a transdisciplinary manner. This unique research programme has the ambition to disentangle the complex relationships of the GPC to secure food, agricultural productivity, a clean environment and ultimately, a closed phosphorus cycle as part of a sustainable circular bio-economy.

While phosphorus, like water, is essential for everyone, no national or international body is currently responsible for ensuring long-term security and sustainable use of the critical resource. Roles and responsibilities are fragmented and ambiguous, and phosphorus falls through the institutional cracks.

This research project will explore the causes of this chaotic phosphorus governance and how it can be transformed by conceptualizing phosphorus sustainability issues as policy problems. It will explore processes of phosphorus framing and problem definition that can block phosphorus sustainability from entering the institutional agenda leading to success or failure of attempts to improve phosphorus governance. The research will use the UK, the European Union and Australia as exemplars of the success-failure spectrum.

The role is associated with the University of Leeds Postgraduate Research Programme leading to obtaining a PhD.

The research will use the UK, the European Union and Australia as exemplars of the success-failure spectrum.

The main duty for the successful candidate will be to carry out such research supervised by Professor Julia Martin-Ortega from the University of Leeds and Associate Professors Dana Cordell and Brent Jacobs from University Technology Sydney in Australia.

The role also includes close interaction with the other fourteen Early Stage Researchers (ESR) of the RecaP International Training Programme, including at least three secondments at RecaP partner organisations across Australia and Europe, contributing to the delivery of programme level outputs.