The Ethics/Philosophy of Technology Section of Delft University of Technology offers two positions for PhD students as part of the research project ‘Responsibility arrangements in resilience policy for climate adaptation’. The project is supported by an NWO Vidi Grant and will be conducted by Professor Neelke Doorn (PI) and 2 PhD candidates. A detailed description of the project can be requested.

Climate change increases the risk of extreme weather events, such as heavy rainfall and droughts. Under the header of resilience, citizens are increasingly expected to take responsibility and to transform their own community into a climateresilient living environment. However, this gives rise to pressing ethical questions that have not yet been addressed in the academic literature. The aim of the project is to investigate under what conditions these new responsibility arrangements can be justified, as arrangements may differ in their ethical acceptability as well as their effectiveness. One of the two positions aims to simulate responsibility arrangements and their effectiveness through the use of agent-based models.

This PhD-project will create an agent-based model to simulate different responsibility arrangements. It will investigate what the different resilience arrangements expect from citizens and what citizens need to act accordingly, e.g. in terms of resources and information, but also in terms of community characteristics, such as cohesion, familiarity with other community members. The main aim of this project is to study the effectiveness of empirically traced responsibility arrangements under different conditions. Additionally, this project will identify patterns of responsibility arrangements that score high on both social justice and effectiveness.