dr. JKL (Johanna) Koehler

Johanna Koehler is Assistant Professor of Environmental Risk Governance in the Public Administration and Policy Group at Wageningen University and Research. Her research interests include the governance of sustainability transformations, especially with regard to innovations in water services, and the governance of hydroyclimatic extreme events. She investigates how risks and responsibilities can be re-conceptualised and re-allocated in pluralist governance arrangements between the state, market, and communities. Theoretically, her work advances institutional theory of risk; methodologically, she uses qualitative and quantitative methods, including experiments, to understand social and institutional behaviours with regard to environmental governance, working with governments, the private sector, and end users.

As a VENI Laureate from the Dutch Research Council's Talent Scheme (NWO), she works on her RiskPOOL project, which examines risk-pooling and institutional innovation in sustainable water service transitions across the Global South and North. Johanna has been teaching courses on environmental policy, water policy, food governance and sustainability as well as research design and methods. She currently co-supervises PhD students at Wageningen, Amsterdam, and Oxford, including on EU-funded projects PerfectSTORM (storylines of future extremes) and NEWAVE (next water governance).

Johanna is Visiting Fellow at VU Amsterdam where she was previously based as Assistant Professor of Environmental Policy and Governance (2020-23). She is also Honorary Research Associate at the School of Geography and the Environment and the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment, University of Oxford, and works on the REACH programme on water security across observatories in Kenya, Ethiopia, and Bangladesh. She is an Academic Editor of PLOS Water. Regularly working with practitioners, she is co-founder and trustee of a rural water service provider in Kenya, FundiFix, which serves over 80,000 people with reliable water services.

Johanna holds a DPhil (no corrections) in Geography and the Environment from the University of Oxford, an MSc (with Distinction) in Water Science, Policy and Management from the University of Oxford, and a BA (First Class Honours) in History and International Relations from Royal Holloway, University of London. In 2018 she was joint winner of the inaugural University of Oxford's Vice Chancellor's Innovation Award, and from 2020-22 she was part of the Bosch Academy for Transformational Leadership (2020-22) focused on sustainability and transformation research, especially with regard to land use practices in a globalised world.