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. ...

MPP Closing Ceremony Another Year Complete: We congratulate our 2021-2022 cohort on completing the programme! Enter keywords...

How to choose a topic for your master’s thesis? “Few assignments can be as intimidating at university as writing a thesis,” acknowledges Master’s student Lais Bonetto. How do you pick your topic and how do you conduct your research? Find out what motivated Lais and her fellow students in their choices. Enter keywords...

On 25 November 2021, staff and students representing our Master of Science in Public Policy and Human Development (MPP) commemorated the United Nations International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women. The event aimed to raise awareness about the issue, while also presenting the MPP’s new Sexual Harassment Document. This awareness document reflects the commitment of the MPP to contribute to the elimination of gender-based violence, and provides students and staff with resources to...

Our Master’s alumna Claire Tan Sze Eng has won the best thesis award at the Dutch Demography Day 2021 for her dissertation entitled, ‘Returning to a home without a future: The effect of migrant trajectories and experiences on the reintegration of Albanian rejected asylum-seekers’. Based on some 40 in-depth interviews carried out under the EU-funded ADMIGOV project in the first quarter of 2020, the study found strong intersectionality between economic, psychological and security reintegration out...

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...

Our Master of Science in Public Policy and Human Development (MPP) made it into the Top 20 of the Going BEYOND Award from the ‘Global Business School Network’, a non-profit organisation founded by the World Bank in 2003, based in Washington DC, USA. The award recognises programmes and initiatives that demonstrate a positive impact on society, and that go BEYOND traditional offerings from academic institutions and research journals. In particular, winning entries should show how they: Empower and...

On 3 November 2021, students of the Master’s of Science in Public Policy and Human Development (MPP) presented papers that they had written for their Public Policy course. Their papers variously analysed the influence of civil society in the policy process of a selected county and on a selected policy problem, and the event aimed to encouraged open debate.  ...

A post by Lisa Färber, former Student Ambassador on our MSc. in Public Policy and Human Development (MPP) … Just a couple of years ago, I was looking for a truly future-oriented Master’s programme. It’s a competitive market, with glossy brochures and slick videos all over social media. But what I’ve always found most helpful is the ‘word of mouth’: i.e. hearing first-hand from alumni or current students what a course is like in practice. So when I saw the advert for the new MPP Ambas...

We held the closing ceremony for our Master’s in Public Policy and Human Development (MPP) on 10 June 2021 to commemorate the past academic year and to celebrate the success of the cohort. After a year of COVID-19, this event brought many students and faculty together for the first time, and was a memorable event on many fronts. The event was moderated by Academic Programme Director Julieta Marotta and Professor Franziska Gassmann, and included talks from the MPP student ambassador, student gove...