21 October 2026
With growing environmental emergencies such as climate change and loss of biodiversity, transformative change is needed to prevent ballooning social and ecological costs. While technological and policy solutions are largely known, implementation is slow largely due to socio-behavioural and governance factors. The drivers and barriers to social and behavioural change on sustainability differ between actors (individual, social, organizational, institutional), scope (e.g., energy, resources, food) and scale (local to global). Tackling sustainability challenges thus requires a multi-scalar and multi-dimensional perspective. BRIDGES aims to unite and advance social and behavioural perspectives spanning from individual to institutional and local to global by building on and connecting the breadth of expertise within the Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences (FMG). Our goal is to enable epistemological, theoretical, and methodological innovations and integrations through interdisciplinary projects.
We follow a bottom-up approach allowing all researchers interested in sustainability issues at FMG to bring in their ideas, expand, and connect existing research lines. We highly encourage research that addresses high-impact behaviours, effective and adequate interventions, and governing instruments that address social justice, but other approaches are also welcome.
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RPA Grants |
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Who and What |
Budget: Max €90.000
Eligibility: (1) Researchers with their main affiliation at the FMG may serve as main applicants, including PhDs and postdocs. (2) Project teams consist of two or more FMG members from different departments.
Funding can be used for participant payments, surveys, travel, research materials, research assistant hours, post-doc positions, computing, workshops, or other costs. Funding can be used for new projects or to add a new sustainability-related goal to an existing project. The funding cannot be used for structural personnel costs such as teaching buy-out.
The CSDS's contribution will be limited to financial support and the provision of communication and dissemination platforms. Any additional collaboration will depend on the voluntary engagement of individual members. |
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Deliverables |
The goal of the RPA grantS is to facilitate collaboration across FMG departments. Recipients commit to writing a short blog for the website and presenting their project to our community at an RPA event in the following term (such as a lunch lecture, workshop, or as part of a symposium). |
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Evaluation Criteria |
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Evaluation Procedure |
Admissible projects will be rated on three criteria from 1 (excellent) to 5 (fair) by the RPA board with a quorum of 60%. The ratings will be averaged across raters by project. In the case of ties, both will be funded, or the outcome will be selected randomly. If any RPA board member is an applicant, they will abstain from rating that proposal. Board members will conservatively identify other conflicts of interest and abstain from rating those proposals. |