A guest post by Noa van Mulken, alumna of last year’s 2021-22 MPP cohort Due to the increasing concern for the environment and the need to fight climate change, green careers are becoming increasingly popular. A green career is very diverse and can touch upon many different industries, such as renewable energy, sustainability, clean mobility, or even nature or wildlife conservation. At the recent ‘Growing Green Careers Panel’ event during the UM Sustainability Week, I (together...

A post by Akorshi Sengupta, Alumni Officer at UNU-MERIT          Nexus is a career fair organised by the UNU-MERIT Alumni Office for the purpose of bringing together organisations and candidates who are engaged in societally-minded work. As a UN University, UNU-MERIT supports the furthering of the Sustainable Development Goals, and the alumni office is committed to creating opportunities for their alumni to engage with employers who bring a similar mindset to their work. This year, the even...

Our quarterly newsletter rounds up the latest news and events from UNU-MERIT and its School of Governance. We explore the push and pull of international development: innovation through science and entrepreneurship, and governance through public policy analysis. ...

A joint post by Dr Rasmus Lema (UNU-MERIT) and Dr Clovis Freire (UNCTAD) Hydrogen will play a crucial role in the mounting global efforts to decarbonize our economic systems in the coming decades. Many developing countries have the potential to influence the hydrogen economy, which may provide one-fifth of total energy demand by 2050, especially in those areas that are difficult to electrify. This opens green windows of opportunity for economic development and diversification. Green hydrogen cou...

A joint post by Dr Julieta Marotta & Abigail Daley “Because women have an incredible amount of power that should not be ignored when it comes to building a sustainable future.” International Women’s Day gives us a yearly moment to reflect on gender equality and remind ourselves of our progress and the progress we still need to make. The Master of Science programme in Public Policy and Human Development (MPP), with the support of UNU-MERIT, emphasises its commitment to gender equality by taki...

Our Master’s alumni Vivien Csapliczky (pictured far left) and Job Zomerplaag (pictured far right) have won the biennial ‘Kremers Award’ for having written the best dissertations on regional innovation from a socio-economic perspective. Their theses respectively focused on regional development and digitalisation in southwest Hungary and the (dis)empowerment of community initiatives in the southeast of the Netherlands. Job Zomerplaag, now an editor at Studio Europa Maastricht, said: “Studyin...

Master’s alumnus Manuj Bhardwaj, a lawyer from India, has been awarded a United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) programme scholarship, 2021-23, from the Prince Albert II of Monaco Foundation. IPCC Secretary Abdallah Mokssit called the programme “an important step in the fight against climate change enabling the implementation of innovative and efficient solutions”. Manuj is currently pursuing a Doctorate in Law from American University, Washington DC, w...

PhD alumnus and affiliated researcher Ayo Adedokun was awarded the Leiden University Student platform (LUS) teaching prize, for best lecturer of the year, on 6 September 2021. “Teaching is not merely a profession; it’s a calling,” said Adedokun, who was clearly moved upon receiving the award from the LUS Chair. The prize itself covers 25,000 euros to spend on innovation in teaching and learning, and membership of the University’s Teachers’ Academy. Adedokun started as lecturer at Leiden Universi...

A new Open Access Handbook on Social Protection Systems features contributions from UNU-MERIT researchers Franziska Gassmann, Tamara Kool and Zina Nimeh, as well as alumni Mira Bierbaum, Victor Cebotari and Eszter Timar. This Handbook provides a comprehensive and globally relevant overview of the instruments, actors and design features of social protection systems, as well as their application and impacts in practice. It is the first book that centres around system building globally, a theme tha...

Affiliated researcher and PhD alumnus Dr Carlos Cadena Gaitán has been named one of the ‘21 Heroes of 2021’ by the Transformative Urban Mobility Initiative, a global forum co-sponsored by UN-Habitat. Early in the pandemic, while working as Transport Secretary of Medellín in Colombia, Carlos took a leading role in distributing Personal Protective Equipment to the city’s residents, while personally fighting the virus on public transport with disinfectant sprays. But coronavirus was not the only ki...