This project examines the role of foreign large scale land acquisitions in shaping development, conservation and sustainability practices in Madagascar, Ethiopia and Uganda. The past decade has witnessed an unprecedented rise in foreign direct investment (FDI) in Africa?s arable land, sparking new international debates about land grabbing. While proponents argue that land deals lead to economic growth, poverty alleviation, and environmental protection, detractors point to livelihood losses, cultural changes, land dispossession, and environmental degradation. However, an empirical basis upon which to prove or disprove such assertions is lacking. This project aims to fill this gap by generating an analytical and theoretical framework to analyse the global drivers and local impacts of large-scale mining in Madagascar, foreign food production in Ethiopia, REDD initiatives in Madagascar, and Chinese investments in Ugandas Lake Victoria Free Trade Zone. The project integrates an interdisciplinary (history, anthropology, geography, GIS/Spatial Analysis, political science, ecological economics, linguistics) team of experts active in land studies. Results will be made available and discussed with all relevant stakeholders (smallholders, NGOs, government officials, policy-makers, private sector). Findings should reveal various local realities and implementation processes of land deals thus far lacking in the literature. The research has four aims. First, we will analyse the global actors, networks and interests (e.g. political, economic, social, cultural, environmental) driving foreign land acquisitions, examining the role of the state, neoliberal reforms and donor interests in facilitating land access. Second, a grounded stakeholder analysis will detail local impacts, perceptions and responses to land deals. Third, we will map, through our theoretical model, zones of intermediality, the ontological grids of (inter)national - local stakeholder encounters where diverse ideologies, discourses and practices of land use and valuation are mediated. Fourth, we will use this model to capture commonalities between stakeholders and potential areas of contestation. The four aims are anchored in two phases. Phase I (aims 1, 2) will construct an inventory of stakeholder land claims and intangible/material valuations of land (e.g. heritage, source of identity, biodiversity, food security). Phase II (aims 3, 4) will define zones of intermediality where various cultural paradigms and land claims meet on the same playing field, and imperatives of local cultural references, practices and discourses encounter those of external actors. We posit that this model will neutrally unravel the complexities of stakeholder interaction whilst identifying conflict resolution strategies to mitigate or resolve adverse impacts of land deals.

Personalized dosing of medication by means of therapeutic drug monitoring (TDM) can greatly improve the effectivity of a treatment. In SweatSens, it is investigated whether continuous sweat analysis can be used as a non-invasive alternative for TDM, classically performed via blood analysis. A multiparameter sweat sensor patch will be developed, that can be used in the clinic as well as at home to monitor the excretion of pharmaceuticals in sweat. The patch will enable analysis of the target drugs continuously via the collection of voltammetric fingerprints for the first time. A major challenge in real-time sweat analysis is that sweat rate, salinity, pH and skin temperature change over time and show inter and intra-individual variations. The patch will measure these parameters continuously as well, to compensate for the effects of this changing matrix on the voltammetric measurements of the target drugs. The innovative SweatSens platform will i) be able to induce sweating using iontophoresis, ii) elucidate the effects of sweat induction, changing sweat rate, salinity, pH and temperature on the electrochemical fingerprints of target drugs and iii) show quantitative electrochemical analysis for two use cases: the detection of methotrexate and ceftazidime for respectively cancer therapy and treatment of bacterial infections.

This project deals with 35 books which were produced in the early period of the printing press (1477-c. 1540). These editions contain medieval Dutch narratives, which form just a modest part of the total number of printed texts in the first decades of printing, but whose importance for the history of Dutch literature in the Low Countries is huge. These texts are the vital link between medieval narratives copied in manuscripts and early modern narratives, printed after the middle of the sixteenth century. A crucial media development, i.e. the shift from written to printed books, has affected the nature of these narratives. Whereas earlier investigations were limited to a few individual texts, our research will cover the whole body of early printed Dutch narratives, paying special attention to their innovative features, their heterogeneity, and their relation to the European context. Our investigations will focus on three areas of research: the characteristics of the corpus of medieval Dutch early printed narratives, the motives behind the textual transformations that were applied to the narratives, and the strategies that were used in order to enhance the accessibility and attractiveness of the editions of these texts. This project will provide us with new and reliable insights into a hitherto barely explored body of texts that nonetheless was of great cultural-historical significance.

Freight transport is one of the major causes of CO2 emissions and congestion globally. For the past thirty years, policy attempts and research initiatives have been carried out to create modal shift to rail and waterborne transport. However, we still experience a system that is predominantly truck-based, and that does not exploit the full potential of the well-connected network and the deployed capacity. By aligning business models, operations, regulations, behavioural incentives, data management, and AI, we lead the transition to a sustainable and fair “matching platform” for composite services, defined as Freight Mobility as a Service (FMaaS).

In response to economic pressures and increasing demands on public sector performance, subsequent waves of public sector reforms were introduced over the last decades. During these reform waves, public sector organizations were subject to a wide array of structural changes happening in rapid succession. While there is little consistency in these reforms, a strong focus on creating entrepreneurial, non-bureaucratic organizations is one tenet all reforms share. Yet literature warns for reform fatigue and reform stress within organizations, suggesting that such a constant exposure to structural changes may in fact undermine the anti-bureaucracy objective of reforms. Reform programs thus may defeat their own purposes. Nonetheless, public administration research has largely neglected the impact of such sequential, repeated and often-conflicting structural reforms on public sector organizations. This innovative research addresses this gap and seeks to explore the effect of accumulated reform stress, caused by intensive past structural reforms, on the entrepreneurial nature of public sector organizations. This is studied using cross-country data, through case studies and by employing an innovative statistical technique that allows to mimic an experimental research design. In addition, important institutional and politico-administrative variables are controlled for. Although the prime focus is theoretical – the aim is to understand the effects of multiple reforms on the entrepreneurial nature of public sector organizations – the implications are profoundly practical and help policy-makers to improve public services.