Barbara Neumann

Dr. Barbara Neumann

Research Group Leader

Barbara Neumann leads the Ocean Governance Research Group at RIFS since September 2022. Trained as a geographer, she has specialized human-environment interactions, sustainable development and (environmental) governance of coastal and marine areas. Her research interest is in understanding how governance processes can be designed and supported in such a way that they foster sustainable approaches and provide responses to the challenges ahead. She employs transdisciplinary and transformative research approaches and focuses particularly on the interface of science, policy/administration, and civil society. Barbara and was a research associate at the Chair of Physical Geography and Environmental Research at Saarland University, Germany, from 1997 to 2010 and received her PhD in 2022. From 2010 to 2017, she was a member of the Cluster of Excellence "The Future Ocean" in Kiel and employed as a research associate in the working group Coastal Risks and Sea Level Rise at the Institute of Geography at Kiel University. Here she researched and taught on climate change, sea-level rise impacts, and sustainability and governance of coastal areas. She joined the RIFS (formerly the Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies, IASS) in 2017.