Eszter Kelemen
Regional Society: ESEE
Country: Hungary
Background:
I have an MSc in economics and a PhD in environmental sciences. I am co-founder and a senior researcher at the Environmental Social Science Research Group (ESSRG), a small non-profit research company based in Budapest, Hungary. My main research areas include the deliberative and socio-cultural valuation of nature and ecosystem services, the institutional analysis of food system transformations, and the critical appraisal of science-policy-society interactions. I am committed to work in collaboration with various knowledge holders and to co-produce knowledge across diverse disciplines and knowledge systems. Beside European projects which fill most of my working time, I participated in several IPBES assessments as LA or CLA over the last 8 years.
Motivation:
Ecological economics provided the conceptual foundation for my PhD studies, and I have been a member of the European Society for Ecological Economics since the early years of my career.
I served as a country contact of ESEE for several years and then acted as one of its vice presidents between 2018-2021.
Coming from a small Eastern European country, I experienced how much support an international scientific community can provide to young scholars who generally have fewer opportunities and might face severe institutional barriers to finding their place in already established research networks.
My main motivation to join the ISEE board is to increase collaboration across different parts of the world and to empower young scholars who are coming from vulnerable regions and communities. I believe that providing more opportunities to the upcoming generation of ecological economists is of key importance if ISEE, as a vivid international community, would like to play a part in societal transformations.
