We are pleased to announce the George Soros Visiting Chairs appointed for this academic year, along with the courses they will be teaching.
The George Soros Visiting Chair and Practitioner Chair are awarded to scholars and practitioners who have demonstrated outstanding achievement and a distinguished record of engagement in the academic, professional, journalistic, political, or civic world of public policy.
For the fall term, Eirini Patsea from the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) has been appointed, while Philipp Pattberg from Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam will join us for the spring term. Both will offer elective courses that students can take during their respective terms.
Eirini Patsea is a Visiting Practitioner Chair who brings over a decade of international experience in managing policy cycles, institutional reform, and governance practice, gained through senior roles at the OSCE, INGOs and NGO sector, as well as in academic settings. Her work bridges evidence-based policymaking, systems thinking, and behavioral insights, with a strong emphasis on monitoring, evaluation, and learning in complex environments.
Want to learn how policies are really made — from design to evaluation to communication? Join Managing the Policy Cycle: Results-Based Frameworks, Behavioral Insights, and Strategic Communication (DOPP5692A). This hands-on seminar covers the entire policy cycle. Students will practice the real tasks of policy professionals — from drafting Theories of Change and SMART indicators, to running a Monitoring & Evaluation framework, to framing reforms for stakeholders and social media. You’ll also take part in a multi-stakeholder simulation, getting an insider’s view of how evidence, politics, and communication collide in practice.
Designed as career preparation, the course equips you with the skills, insights, and standards of excellence needed to perform in ministries, international organizations, and NGOs.
Philipp Pattberg is Professor of Transnational Environmental Governance at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (VU) and department head at the Environmental Policy Analysis Department of the Institute for Environmental Studies (IVM). Philipp is also Director of the Amsterdam Sustainability Institute, the VU Amsterdam’s interfaculty research institute on sustainability and the UN SDGs. His research focuses on global environmental politics, institutional complexity, and innovative governance approaches to sustainability challenges. He has published extensively on climate change, biodiversity, and transnational governance, and his work informs EU and UN policy processes. He co-edits the Routledge Series in Global Environmental Governance and serves on multiple editorial boards. Pattberg is a senior fellow of the Earth System Governance Project and currently serves as the chair of SDSN expert board, Dutch Chapter.
Philipp Pattberg will teach a course in the spring term titled “Selected Issues in Global Environmental Governance”. The purpose of this course is to critically engage with the theories, concepts and empirics of Global Environmental Governance. Global environmental change is one of the great challenges humankind is facing. Humans now influence all biological and physical systems of the planet. The entire earth system now operates well outside the normal state exhibited over the past 500,000 years, and that human activity is generating change that extends well beyond natural variability – in some cases, alarmingly so – and at rates that continue to accelerate. The central question from a social science perspective is how to organize the co-evolution of societies and their surrounding environment in the new planetary epoch of the Anthropocene. In other words, how to develop effective and equitable governance solutions for today’s polycrisis.