Three ERC Advanced Grants to Stockholm University

The EU Research Council ERC has decided on the prestigious Advanced Grants in the 2022 call. The grant goes to senior researchers for research of the highest quality. A total of 218 researchers in Europe receive grants, of which 13 are in Sweden. Three of the Swedish grants go to researchers at Stockholm University. Other Swedish universities receiving ERC grants are Karolinska Institutet, Lund University, Uppsala University and Gothenburg University.

Maja Schlüter: Building models of, with and for sustainability transformations

Maja Schlüter
Photo:SRC

Maja Schlüter, Professor at the Stockholm Resilience Centre (SRC), is preliminary granted almost 2.5 million euros over five years for the project "Building models of, with and for sustainability transformations”. Maja Schlüter is also the first researcher at Stockholm University to be granted both a Starting Grant and a Consolidator Grant and now an Advanced Grant by the ERC.

The grant will fund research on processes of transformative change in the context of natural resource governance and food systems across the Global South and North. Its aim is to better understand how novel ideas, capacities, practices and system trajectories emerge and take root within existing socio-political, historical and ecological contexts.

“This is a wonderful opportunity to continue some of the exciting interdisciplinary work on the dynamics of social-ecological systems we have been doing as a team over the last 10 years,” says Maja Schlüter.

Read article om Maja Schlüter´s research project on the SRC web.
 

Jonas Tallberg: Democracy, Autocracy, and International Cooperation

Jonas Tallberg
Photo: Niklas Björling

Jonas Tallberg, professor at the Department of Political Science, is provisionally granted almost 2.5 million euros over five years for the project "Democracy, Autocracy, and International Cooperation".

According to Jonas Tallberg, the ERC grant makes it possible to develop a new research agenda on the relationship between countries' political systems and their approach to international cooperation.
“This is a classic political science question, which I believe requires a new examination in the light of new development trends in the outside world and new scientific conditions in the form of data and methods.”

Jonas Tallberg also believes that it is a crucial issue in our time, where cross-border problems such as climate change, financial crises and pandemics require joint international efforts, while at the same time tensions between democracies and autocracies are increasing.

Furthermore, he sees the grant as an opportunity to further strengthen the research environment at Stockholm University in matters of global and regional cooperation, Global and Regional Governance.

Read more on Jonas Tallberg´s research.

Jakob Svensson: Lack of markets for African small farmers

Jakob Svensson
Photo: Hanna Weitz

Jakob Svensson, professor at the Institute for International Economics, is provisionally granted almost 2.1 million euros over five years for the project "It's (also) what you produce: Experimental Evidence on Creating Markets for Quality in Low-income Countries".

The project aims at investigating why income and productivity in African agriculture remain low by zeroing in on the lack of markets for quality where farmers can sell their crops for a higher price.

“I believe that the project will help open up and establish a demand-focused research literature on agricultural development in low-income countries and help us answer the question of whether agriculture, especially in Africa, can play a central role in creating a way out of poverty and if so how”, says Jakob Svensson.

Read article on Jakob Svensson´s research project on the IIES web.
 

Partner in project at the Gothenburg University

In addition, a researcher at Stockholm University participates as a partner in an awarded ERC Advanced Grant. It is Matthew Lindquist, professor at the Institute for Social Research, who participates in the project "Breaking the Inequality-Crime Cycle: Biases in Police Decisions, 'What Works' in Prison, and Firm Demand for Workers with Criminal Records" led by Randi Hjalmarsson at Gothenburg University. The preliminary budget for Stockholm University is approximately 667,552 euros for five years.

See abstracts below.
 

Abstract Maja Schlüter:

While the need for sustainability transformations is ubiquitous, understanding why and how they succeed or fail is limited. Explanations often focus on either agency-related or systemic factors. Understanding the complex dynamics of transformations, however, requires approaches that bridge perspectives, and recognize the interdependent personal, political, social and ecological dynamics at play.
TRANSMOD addresses this gap through interdisciplinary analysis of transformative change in the context of natural resource governance and food systems across the Global South and North. It focuses on how novel ideas and practices emerge and take root in response to crises, such as resource decline or Covid-19, and in interaction with existing structures and processes, such as dominant narratives, power relations and biophysical dynamics.

The project will reach its objectives through an approach that transcends a focus on systemic processes versus agency by analysing change or lack thereof as emerging from their relations. It will achieve this through two methodological advancements: i) combining simulation modelling with empirical research of past transformations, which allows analysing key material and immaterial social and social-ecological processes through in-depth case studies and testing their effect on emergent system dynamics through modelling, and ii) making sense of the complexities of change through engaging in ongoing change-making processes. Together, these activities will serve the development of complexity-aware theories of transformation.

The project will open up new opportunities for sustainability science by establishing the conceptual and methodological foundations for research that goes beyond natural-social divides with the help of building applying a next generation of social-ecological models. This will enable new ways of theorising that account for the complexity of cross-scale and interconnected social-ecological dynamics of the Anthropocene.
 

Abstract Jonas Tallberg:

One of the most consistent findings in the study of world politics is the positive relationship between democratic regimes and international cooperation. Yet events in recent years suggest a more complicated picture. Several democracies have withered in their support for international organizations, while autocracies simultaneously have stepped up their commitments to cooperation. This project will use recent developments as a backdrop for launching a new research agenda on the relationship between regime type and international cooperation. Guided by the over-arching question of why, how, and under what conditions regime type affects international cooperation, this project will conduct the most systematic and comprehensive analysis so far of this relationship. Theoretically, it will break new ground by developing a novel framework for identifying how regime type may have varying and conditional effects on international cooperation. Empirically, it will be more comprehensive than any previous research effort, examining this relationship over a longer time period and across a broader range of international cooperation, based on an extensive new data collection. Methodologically, it will leverage an ambitious multi-method design, combining large-N statistical analysis, experimental analysis, and in-depth case analysis in a complementary fashion and with a comparative orientation. In addition, the project will be policy relevant by generating insights on the resilience (or not) of international cooperation in an age of democratic decline.
 

Abstract Jakob Svensson:

Half of the world's extreme poor – or over 430 million people – live in Sub-Saharan Africa. The vast majority live in rural areas and work in agriculture, where productivity is desperately low. This keeps welfare low now – and in the future – as agricultural productivity increases are seen as a condition for both structural transformation and to avoid the worst impacts of climate change. This is the motivation for bringing the green revolution – which has so far bypassed the continent – to Sub-Saharan Africa. Despite the logic being compelling, the results from a decade of research on technology adoption in African agriculture have been largely disappointing. Interventions aimed at increasing farmers ability to invest in inputs to produce more of what they already do have not proven transformative. In this research proposal, I will investigate a complementary explanation why income and productivity in African agriculture remain low: it is what farmers produce – precisely the quality and value added of their output – that keeps them poor, and they produce low quality because there is no demand for smallholders to produce high quality or higher value-added outputs. As low quality limits price and thus farmers' potential income, missing markets for quality can help explain the low returns to farming. At the core of this research proposal is the hypothesis that markets for quality are missing because of a fundamental information problem: quality is a difficult to observe characteristic. I will rely on three multi-wave randomized controlled field trials to study technological and institutional solutions to overcome this information problem, which hamper demand for high quality products in the export market (work package I) and at home (work package II). In the final work package, I will complete the cycle and study how increases in demand for high quality outputs, and access to high quality inputs, can jump-start a green revolution in rural Africa.