Profile

Joost Vervoort has taken up the position of Scenarios Officer for the CGIAR Core Research Programme 7, CCAFS (Climate Change And Food Security), at the Environmental Change Institute, University of Oxford. Joost will defend his PhD in Production Ecology and Resources Conservation at Wageningen University in November 2011. He holds a MSc. in Natural Resources Management from Utrecht University.

An ecologist by training with backgrounds in system dynamic and spatial modelling, Joost has moved towards interdisciplinary, participatory work on social-ecological systems analysis. Through his research in Wageningen, he has developed and explored a range of new communication strategies and tools aimed at facilitating shared understanding of and engagement with the futures of interacting human and natural systems. He has applied online participatory perspective mapping techniques in EU-level and UK case studies. In Oxfordshire, UK, he has developed scenario storylines and multi-media scenarios animations with regional stakeholders. In the Netherlands, he has been part of the agro-ecological innovation network TransForum, working as part of the research theme "images of sustainable agriculture". Among the projects in this network, he explored how agricultural innovators cross disciplinary boundaries to create accepted change in their systems.

Joost has also set up a series of workshops and lectures in 2010 with multi-media artists and designers to develop new concepts for communication about complexity in social-ecological systems. The results of this project included concepts for serious games, group interaction installations and interactive media storytelling. He has coordinated a researchers’ training and discussion platform "Stakeholder Participation in Scientific Research" from 2008 to 2010. Joost has been involved in both the Resilience Alliance and the socio-technical transitions theory communities.

As CCAFS Scenarios Officer, Joost will be part of the organization of regional participatory stakeholder workshops, linking the qualitative scenario outputs to quantitative modelling, the dissemination and engagement strategies for the scenarios, and the integration of the scenarios in the CCAFS programme. Joost is also a guest researcher at the Land Dynamics group of Wageningen University. Joost’s current research interests include

resilience and adaptive capacity in social-ecological systems, participatory scenarios and modelling, scenario visualization and serious gaming.

Recent publications

Vervoort, J.M., Kok, K, van Lammeren, R, and Veldkamp, T, 2010. Stepping into futures: exploring the potential of interactive media for participatory scenarios on social-ecological systems. Futures 42 (6), p.p. 604-616

Beers, P.J., Veldkamp, A., Hermans, F., van Apeldoorn, D., Vervoort, J.M., Kok, K., 2010. Future Sustainability and images. Futures 42 (7), p.p. 723-732