Research Affiliate
Dr Johanna Koehler is Associate Professor of Environmental Risk Governance in the Public Administration and Policy Group at Wageningen University and Research in the Netherlands. Her research strives to understand how the way environmental crises are perceived and portrayed influences the potential of society to realise sustainability transformations. Her current research tests whether and how innovative governance arrangements for environmental problems can be designed that combine contrasting ways of perceiving and organising risks and responsibilities. She has established an interdisciplinary research programme on environmental risk governance linking theories from public policy, geography, anthropology, and science and technology studies with the study of wicked problems in the governance of hydroclimatic extremes, with a focus on water scarcity, including Day Zero events, and innovations in water service provision across Africa, South Asia, Europe, and South America.
She is a laureate of the prestigious Dutch Research Council Veni and Vidi grants on risk-pooling and institutional innovation in sustainable water service transitions across the Global South and North (RiskPOOL, 2022-26), and transformation under pressure: harnessing plural risk images for governing urban water crises (UnderPRESSURE, 2026-31). She has also worked on a number of European-funded research projects including GroundedExtremes (groundwater risk governance), PerfectSTORM (storylines of future extremes), and NEWAVE (next water governance).
Before joining Wageningen, she was based at the VU Amsterdam as Assistant Professor and at Oxford University, where she was Research Associate and Water Programme Manager at the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment, working, inter alia, on the 10-year FCDO-funded REACH programme on water security in Africa and Asia. She completed her MSc and DPhil (Clarendon Scholar) at the School of Geography and the Environment (Oxford) and was Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Christ Church. 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.
