Sustainability

The first impetus for what was then still called “nature and environment studies” was a memo from 1992 urging the then faculties of Economics, Law and Social Sciences to join forces. The memo was drafted by econometrist and environmental economist Wim Hafkamp, who was lecturing at several faculties at the time and attempting to advance Tilburg University’s profile in the field of the environment. His endeavors were partly prompted by a report of the national Environmental Economics (MEIN) commission in the late eighties, which had concluded that the Netherlands was showing gaps in the fields of environmental economics theory and business economics.

Several approaches

At that point in time, each faculty was engaging in environmental and sustainability topics separately; Piet Gilhuis, Professor of Constitutional and Administrative Law, for instance, was specializing in Environmental Law. The Hafkamp memo, however, received no more than a lukewarm response, and though cross-discipline collaboration never made the grade, the first faculty-bound professorships did crop up: Aart de Zeeuw was appointed Professor of Environmental Economics at the Economics Faculty in 1993, followed by Chris Backes as a Professor of European and International Environmental Law (1995), Nigel Roome as a Professor of Business Economics (1995) and Jacqueline Cramer as a Professor of Environmental Management (1996). Too little too late for Hafkamp. In 1995, he left with a number of business economics scholars (including Roome) for Rotterdam, where he felt there were better prospects for an interdisciplinary approach. Though this was quite a loss for Tilburg, the subject of environmental economics was to prosper in the General Economics department. De Zeeuw, for instance was to become president of the European Association of Environmental and Resource Economists in 1998 and, in 2009, co-director of the Beijer Institute of Ecological Economics at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm.

Tilburg Sustainability Center

With the foundation of the Tilburg Sustainability Center (TSC) in 2009, inter-faculty collaboration became more structural. In 2017, it had three lines of research: Climate Action, Resource Efficiency and Related Societal Challenges. Its research programs focus not only on socio-economic and legal aspects of issues such as climate change, geotechnology, energy taxation and energy labels, but also on the most effective ways of combating deforestation in Ghana. The TSC’s scope also includes the use of ICT in responding to natural disasters and the economic analysis of political instruments and international treaties. About fifty scientists are allied with TSC either directly or indirectly. The Institute collaborates with CentERdata and Telos, a sustainability research institute that is co-financed by the provincial North-Brabant authorities. Amongst other things, Telos publishes the National Monitor of Sustainable Municipalities in the Netherlands. The last Monitor (2017) registered sustainability trends for all 388 Dutch municipalities in the 2014-2017 period and drew links with the UN Sustainable Development Goals. In Ghana, environmental economist Daan van Soest investigates how deforestation can be checked most effectively