Heleen Mees is an Associate Professor of local sustainability governance. She is the research coordinator and member of the Management Team of the Environmental Governance group. Heleen is Board member and coordinator of the Geosciences Honours College. She teaches in various courses at MSc and BSc level.
Heleen combines analytical skills with extensive communicative, organisational and leadership skills, gained from a former career as a global project leader in the international marketing of fast moving consumer goods. Her research interests concern (supra-)local governance issues related to urban sustainable development, including topics such as: governance modes, responsibility allocations, climate justice, democratic governance (legitimacy & accountability), forms of citizen engagement and the roles of citizen initiatives. Her main empirical field of interest is climate change adaptation governance.
In the last 5 years Heleen has been involved in leading and supporting roles for several transdisciplinary research projects. Heleen is the PI for the trans-disciplinary BEAT THE HEAT research project (2023-2027) in which we study 'heat poverty' in climate change adaptation through a climate justice lens, and fuel the debate about health related climate change adaptation in the Global North and Global South, with the ultimate aim to co-develop fair governance arrangements. For the research project RISKSEC 2.0 project, an interdisciplinary project into the securitisation of climate change adaptation with 4 European universities (2020-2024) Heleen leads the Dutch part of the research. For TRANSADAPT, an interdisciplinary international project on Bottom-up initiatives for climate change adaptation with 4 European universities (JPI Climate; 2015-2018) Heleen led the empirical work package in the consortium. Heleen is also involved as co-promotor in CCAFS (2018-2023), a trans-disciplinary project on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security; in LOSS (2020-2024), a trans-disciplinary project on soil subsidence.; in IMPETUS (2022-2026), a trans-disciplinary European project run by KWR that aligns various governance levels and adaptation policies.