Martijn de Vries is a PhD candidate of the Department of Engineering Systems and Services. He holds a Master's degree in Philosophy and in Environment and Resource Management. 

I am a transdisciplinary action-researcher interested in sustainable transitions.

With my background in environmental science, economics, and philosophy, I am particularly interested in how collective action problems complicate the realization of sustainable transitions. As a Lead Researcher at Populytics, a spin-off from the TU Delft, I collaborate with administrators, policymakers, and citizens to investigate we can do about the most pressing collective action problems surrounding climate-, energy-, and mobility transitions. The lessons learned in doing so end up in dissertation on Participatory Value Evaluation (PVE), a new approach for Participatory, Value-driven, and mission-oriented Evaluation of complex policy issues.

The following questions and themes are central in my dissertation:

Participation (& digital democracy): How can we use digital participation tools and evaluation methods to make decision-making more inclusive and democratic? And how do we combine digital tools with offline participation processes?

Values (& broad prosperity): How can administrators base concrete policy choices on more than traditional economic models and indicators? With more attention to values that are difficult to measure but at least as important, such as sustainability and justice?

Evaluation (mission-oriented): How can we design policy evaluations and participation processes to provide actionable perspectives for urgent societal challenges while maintaining room to learn from new perspectives?

More information about the Participatory Value Evaluation (PVE) method here: https://www.tudelft.nl/tbm/pve.