Ronald Walusimbi

Participatory interventions to foster cooperation in face of regime shifts and systemic risk

Project affiliation:   B3

Ronald Walusimbi is a PhD Candidate on the DFG-funded Research Training Group “Ecological Regime Shifts and Systemic Risk in Coupled Social-Ecological Systems”, working on understanding behavior and the role of inner factors in telecoupled settings facing systemic risks involving heterogeneous actors. He aims to understand how participatory methods can be adapted to allow upscaling to situations where actors are geographically distant. The PhD research will involve: development of online tools for participatory processes; an online economic lab experiment assessing behavior with and without such processes, connecting students in two different countries. The study aims at reducing deforestation, water scarcity, and/or eutrophication in the agricultural transition. He is working under the subproject “Participatory Interventions to Foster Cooperation in the Face of Regime Shifts and Systemic Risk” at the Department of Environmental Economics under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Stefanie Engel since October, 2024.
In addition, Ronald Walusimbi is an Applied Agricultural Economist by training and has worked on a climate-smart research project at Makerere University since May 2021 using experimental economics. Furthermore, he supported research activities including facilitation of in-lab experiments and a field survey among urban consumers for the EU-Funded FooDLAND project. Before that, Ronald served as an Agricultural Officer immediately after finishing his Bachelor degree, advising smallholder farmers under Mubende District Local Government in Uganda. His research skills and participatory approaches were enhanced during his employment with the Central Archdiocesan Province Caritas Association (CAPCA) in Uganda on a DANIDA-funded project as a Monitoring and Advocacy officer and Project Coordinator where the NGO-IDEAs "Impact Toolbox", a participatory toolbox to encourage beneficiary participation in project goal-setting and evaluation, promoting participatory project evaluation, was introduced.