I am an Associate Professor for International Relations and the Environment at the Department of Political Science of the University of Vienna and Visiting Research Fellow at the Centre for Science and Polic (CSaP) of the University of Cambridge. Since 2018, I have been the principal investigator of the ERC Starting Grant project MARIPOLDATA (2018-2023), and since 2019 member of the Young Academy of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, a Senior Fellow of the Earth System Governance Platform, and a member of the Young Academy of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW). In 2023, I received an ERC Consolidator Grant for my project “Unlocking the full potential of digital twins for sustainable ocean futures”.
My main research interest is the role of knowledge and science in international environmental politics and within the context of global environmental negotiations and agreement-making. I want to understand the processes that lead to epistemic authority, legitimacy, and scientific and political self-evidence, which I conceptualize in terms of ‘epistemic selectivities’. I have developed and applied this concept to analyze and describe how particular representations and concepts of biological diversity are favored over others and how this is mirrored in intergovernmental negotiation settings and institutions (e.g. multilateral environmental agreements, treaty negotiations, and assessment-producing bodies such as the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services – IPBES).
My research aims to understand the conflicts and power struggles emerging between and within states and the different epistemic communities competing for epistemic authority. This includes empirical research at intergovernmental negotiation sites of multilateral environmental agreements and global assessment-producing bodies developed and designed to cope with environmental problems and related state interests.
In the past years, I have conducted fieldwork at more than 15 multilateral negotiation sites, including:
- Conferences of the Parties of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD),
- Plenaries and Working Group sessions of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES)
- The Intergovernmental Group on Earth Observation (GEO)
- Negotiations on a new treaty for the conservation and sustainable use of marine biodiversity beyond national jurisdiction (BBNJ)
I could observe how scientific and non-scientific knowledge forms -including local and indigenous knowledge- compete for legitimacy at the intergovernmental level, shaping how nature is represented, governed, and regulated globally. Struggles over the concept of ecosystem services are one example. Another example is how remote-sensing can support the development of essential biodiversity variables for modeling biodiversity loss. The production of global environmental knowledge is inherently political and needs attention in our study of contemporary international politics and (science) diplomacy.
In November 2018, I started my ERC Starting Grant project, MARIPOLDATA, which aims to develop and apply a new methodology for grounding the analysis of science-policy interrelations in empirical research. The project’s interdisciplinary and multiscale approach tackles barriers between political science research and the social studies of science, to understand the emerging marine biodiversity field and how inequalities related to marine biodiversity monitoring can be addressed, studied, and reduced.
For further information on MARIPOLDATA, please visit www.maripoldata.eu
Contact Details
Assoc. Prof. Dr. Alice Vadrot
Department of Political Science, University of Vienna
Kolingasse 14-16, 5th floor, 5.08.
1090 Vienna, Austria
alice.vadrot@univie.ac.at
+43-1-4277-49465
Short CV
| 02/2021-
11/2018-01/2021 |
Associate Professor for International Relations and the Environment, Department of Political Science, University of Vienna Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, University of Vienna |
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2017-2018 |
Senior Post Doc, Department of Political Science, University of Vienna |
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2015-2017 |
Visiting Research Fellow, Centre for Science and Policy, University of Cambridge |
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2014-2015 |
Head of Research, NEOS Lab (Political Think Tank), Vienna, Austria |
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2010-2014 |
Research Fellow, ICCR Foundation, Vienna, Austria |
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2010-2010 |
Research Assistant, ICCR, Foundation, Vienna, Austria |
Education
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2009-2013 |
PhD, Department of Political Science, University of Vienna |
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2005-2008 |
MPhil., Department of Political Science, University of Vienna |
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2005-2009 |
Studies in Philosophy and Slavonic Studies at the Department of Philosophy, and the Department of Slavonic Studies, University of Vienna (2005-2009), Moscow State University (2007), St. Petersburg State University (2006) and Department of Philosophy, Université Panthéon Sorbonne, Paris, France (2008-2009). |
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Drawings by Alice Vadrot |