PhD: Participatory Data Governance for Energy Justice

TU Delft; Delft; A distancia; EUR 36.000 - 45.000; Jornada completa

Descripción de la vacante

The PhD position at TU Delft investigates participatory data governance for an equitable energy transition, focusing on justice, data rights and shared stewardship in energy data infrastructures and digital twins.

You will work with residents, municipalities and partners to design and test governance arrangements, run workshops, and translate findings into actionable requirements for the technical research teams. This role combines social science and design within a multidisciplinary project.

Formación

• Experience with qualitative or participatory research, such as interviews, ethnography, co‑design or workshop facilitation.
• The ability to work respectfully with people who have different forms of expertise and different degrees of power, including communities affected by exclusion or vulnerability.
• A strong interest in data justice, energy justice, data rights, participatory governance or related approaches to equity and accountability.
• Design skills to turn research insights into concepts, prototypes, interactions or tools that people can examine and test together.
• The ability to analyse complex social and organisational settings, communicate findings clearly, and work independently as part of a multidisciplinary team.
• An interest in learning how data infrastructures and digital twins work, so that you can collaborate closely with technical researchers.
• Spoken Dutch skills, sufficient to independently conduct interviews and facilitate inclusive, participatory workshops with local stakeholders in Heiloo and Alkmaar, including residents, neighbourhood organisations, local business and policymakers.

Responsabilidades

• Investigate how energy data is collected, shared and used, and whose needs, efforts, risks and knowledge are recognised in those processes.
• Through interviews, data ethnography, stakeholder and power mapping, and participatory workshops, build an understanding of both personal energy data and wider energy system data.
• Develop a participatory data governance framework informed by Human-Data Interaction principles of legibility, agency and negotiability, and by Energy Data Justice.
• Facilitate inclusive workshops with residents, businesses, public authorities and technical partners, using role play, serious games and scenario-based co-design.
• Co-design governance roles, decision processes, data access and control arrangements, and ways for people to question, contest or revise data-sharing terms.
• Design and prototype social and digital interactions that help people understand data practices, join governance processes and exercise meaningful influence.
• Explore fair incentives and ways for the value created through data sharing to flow back to those who contribute data, effort or local knowledge.
• Develop an onboarding playbook and a practical governance and stewardship toolkit, then help test these arrangements in the project’s joint case study.
• Translate findings into actionable governance requirements and data rights constraints for the project’s technical researchers, while learning from what their prototypes make possible in practice.
• Publish your research in academic venues and share usable findings with project partners and participating communities.

Conocimientos

Qualitative research

Participatory design

Interviews

Workshop facilitation

Stakeholder mapping

Power dynamics

Data justice awareness

Educación

Master's degree in design

Descripción del empleo

The PhD position at TU Delft investigates participatory data governance for an equitable energy transition, focusing on justice, data rights and shared stewardship in energy data infrastructures and digital twins.

You will work with residents, municipalities and partners to design and test governance arrangements, run workshops, and translate findings into actionable requirements for the technical research teams. This role combines social science and design within a multidisciplinary project.