Melanie Nagel is a political scientist specializing in environmental policy issues such as climate policy, air pollution control, water management, infrastructure policy and agricultural and food policy. She completed her doctorate at the University of Konstanz in 2014 with a thesis on political polarization in the conflict over Stuttgart 21 and habilitated at the University of Tübingen in 2023 on the topic of ‘Environmental Policy Networks’.
Together with Kira Rehfeld, she is currently leading the research project ‘ICAWaR - Improving climate adaptation policies for water resilience’ at the GUZ - Geo and Environmental Centre. She also works as a senior researcher at the University of Heidelberg and coordinates the project ‘Carbon emission information for local climate action’.
Previously, she was part of the research group ‘AgroBioDiv’ on the ecological transformation of agricultural and food policy in Baden-Württemberg and taught as a visiting professor at the IBEI in Barcelona. She is affiliated as “Privatdozentin” at the Institute of Political Science at the University of Tübingen and substituted the professorship of Prof. Jale Tosun at the University of Heidelberg in the summer semester 2023.
From 2016 to 2020, she worked in the research group ‘Material Theory of the State’ at the University of Konstanz and was a visiting scholar at the University of Arizona in the winter semester 2018/19. As PI of the German research team of the international research network COMPON, she analyses climate policy networks in about 20 countries. She is an active member of the teaching team of the POLNET School of Methods and teaches social network analysis.
