Flanders Reseach Institute for Agriculture, Fisheries and Food hosting offers for MSCA-IF postdoc fellowships in Social Science

MSCA postdoc fellowship hosting offers for 2021 call

The Flanders Research Institute for Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (ILVO) is a public research institute located in Belgium. ILVO performs multidisciplinary, innovative and independent research aimed at economically, ecologically and socially sustainable agriculture and fisheries. Through this research, ILVO accumulates fundamental and applied knowledge which is vital for the improvement of products and production methods, for quality control and the safety of end products, and for the amelioration of policy instruments as a foundation for sector development and agricultural policy for rural areas.

Recently, some important management decisions have been made to orientate the research at ILVO in a holistic framework of systems thinking as well as to combine ILVO's tacit knowledge with new technological approaches like genomics, metabolomics, (remote) sensing technology, artificial intelligence, precision farming, innovative food/feed production technology, new breeding technologies, animal models, modelling as well as participatory social sciences approaches. This means that a lot of the research at ILVO is conducted in Living Labs, such as a Food Pilot, fishing vessels, modern greenhouses and animal farming units, and in the context of inter- and transdisciplinary research. To accelerate and further improve this new research process, ILVO is looking to host young and experienced researchers at post-doc level in the framework of Marie Sklodowska-Curie individual fellowships within the new Horizon Europe framework programmaoriHor.

Possible research items are shown below and are divided over the different research units of ILVO. Please contact the respective contact persons if you are interested in a specific item or research unit.

Social Sciences Unit

Contact persons: Elke Rogge; elke.rogge@ilvo.vlaanderen.be

Fleur Marchand; fleur.marchand@ilvo.vlaanderen.be

Ludwig Lauwers: ludwig.lauwers@ilvo.vlaanderen.be

Participatory farm modelling.

ILVO has a research line focusing on the participatory development of farm models that support on-farm decision making. In order to facilitate adoption of these models in practice, stakeholders are involved in the development process from the very beginning onwards. They help in defining the system and system boundaries to be modelled, and contribute to incorporating tacit knowledge from practice into the models. Models are developed for different agricultural sectors (pig, dairy, etc.) and are transformed into user-friendly decision support tools. Besides analyzing participatory model development as a process, an important focus of the research lies in analyzing the interplay between strategic ‘long term’ decisions and operational ‘short term’ decision making, and dealing with this interplay in modelling efforts.

Participatory GIS for open space management.

Open space is under pressure due to the increasing population density and processes of urbanisation and counter-urbanisation. Remaining open space is scarce and the subject of debate. Various functions such as nature development, residential development, recreation, food production, flood protection,… compete and claim the same valuable pieces of land. Both rural, urban and peri-urban communities are faced with the question of how to deal with these competing claims and how to preserve/manage open space in a context of urbanisation. Specifically in the context of climate change, these issues will become even more prominent, as open space is a crucial asset for climate adaptation. Within this research line we explore the potential of using participatory GIS as a tool to stimulate this dialogue and envisioning processes within resourceful community management of open space. Participatory GIS is a methodology that can be applied to reveal stakeholder’s values for specific places (often referred to as “public participation GIS”) or to gather (spatially explicit) tacit knowledge from stakeholders (referred to as “participatory mapping”). Moreover, it can be applied to support multi-actor discussions and problem solving processes in spatial planning. This field of research is situated on the interface between community participation digital geospatial techniques.