Informational uncertainties in the western and central Pacific Ocean tuna fisheries threaten the sustainability of tuna stocks and the livelihoods of fishing communities. This is especially true in Indonesia, where a high reliance on tuna for domestic fish consumption coupled with large tuna exports and disparate and disaggregated management means that fishing pressure will likely continue to increase in order to meet domestic and export demand. The ability of these tuna fisheries to support livelihoods, appetites and businesses relies in part on the extent to which information is provided by and communicated to fishermen and processors in Indonesia. In response, this project will develop a traceability-based technology (TBT) platform that creates bidirectional information exchange between Indonesian fishermen, processors and traders, helping to link fishermen with fisheries information and global markets, and helping processors and traders to meet informational requirements originating from importing regions.

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In today’s globalised and multicultural society, attitude, skills and knowledge to collaborate across diverse teams is a must. The recent anti-racism movements have further demonstrated the importance of dealing with diversity. The Bachelor Environmental Sciences (BES) programme at Wageningen University focuses on global environmental issues in international collaborative settings. The switch to become an international programme in 2018, and inflow of a mix of international students, provides new opportunities to develop students’ intercultural competence. This project’s innovation comprises the design and structural embedding of a coherent curricular learning pathway for the development of intercultural competencies, applying dialogue as a key method for collective learning and inquiry. While dialogue as a method has proven to be able to foster co-creative meaning-making across boundaries of practices, it has not been structurally applied in a higher education intercultural curricular learning pathway. Its application throughout the programme allows BES to develop from a programme with international students to a truly international classroom co-creating for global environmental challenges. The project consists of several interrelated activities, also based on dialogue-principles: (1) an inventory of existing developments and projects in skills performance and boundary-crossing; (2) an expert/teacher/student exercise to identify appropriate dialogue-based methods; (3) the improvement/design of dialogical learning activities within identified key courses; (4) implementation and testing the (re)designed activities; (5) alignment and embedding of these activities within a learning pathway; (6) develop insight into students’ competence development within and across various courses, and (7) identifying teachers’ needs to support dialogical learning for intercultural competence development.

The healthcare sector is one of the most carbon-intensive sectors. In response, the Dutch government has called for more environmentally sustainable healthcare. The project ESCH-R addresses this challenge with its mission to accelerate the adoption of circular interventions in hospitals and thereby lower the ecological footprint of the healthcare sector. Our research question is: How can hospitals move away from single use medical consumables and make the transition towards circularity? Together with societal partners, our interdisciplinary team will develop circular, safe and scalable strategies for circularity. In the long-run, the ESCH-R project contributes to a sustainable and resilient health system.

This research focuses on E-practices as they emerge within and around households in the Netherlands in the context of smart grid developments. The study aims to reduce uncertainty for both consumers and providers by investigating the dynamics and characteristics of emerging E-practices This knowledge is used to assess, (re)design and promote E-practices in the near future. We combine qualitative and quantitative research methods in a research design that includes the participation of household-consumers, prosumers, and energy, technology and advisory providers. We use the Social Practices Approach as research perspective which offers new insights in how lifestyle characteristics and competences of consumers co-evolve with objects like smart meters, smart appliances and smart energy infrastructures. The research contributes to reducing uncertainties and risks of smart grid technologies by better embedding them in societal norms and behavioural strategies concerning (sustainable) energy consumption. Two PhD researchers ? supervised by WU and TU/e, supported by Enexis and MilieuCentraal - will investigate and help reduce the uncertainties that consumers (PhD1), and grid operators and energy suppliers (PhD2) encounter in the context of newly emerging E-practices around monitoring and feedback, timing of demand, mobility and energy collectives. The adoption of new technologies, the prediction of demand and co-production, and the new power relations between providers and consumers are key factors in this. A postdoc researcher will coordinate smart energy platform meetings that bring together key players in the mediation between energy provision and consumption and which delivers data on E-practices and recommendations for policy, marketing and energy advice.