Patrizia Nanz (born 9 July 1965 in Stuttgart, Germany) is a political scientist and an expert in public participation and democratic innovations. She has provided expertise to businesses, state agencies, and governments in various European countries.
She was appointed Vice-President of Germany’s Federal Office for the Safety of Nuclear Waste Management (BASE) on 1 February 2021, where she also leads the Collaborative Governance Lab (CO:LAB). She currently serves on the board of trustees of the Fraunhofer Institute for Systems and Innovation Research (ISI).
Until 2021, Patrizia Nanz was scientific director of the Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies (IASS) in Potsdam; professor of transformative sustainability studies at the University of Potsdam; and co-chair of the Science Platform Sustainability 2030, an interdisciplinary platform for research and dialogue to support implementation of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals in Germany. She is founding director of the Deutsch-Französisches Zukunftswerk (Franco-German Forum for the Future), established under the Aachen Treaty. In January 2019 she was appointed by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) as a member of the High-Tech Forum, which advised the German government on its High-Tech Strategy 2025 until 2021. Since 2002 she has held a professorship in political theory at the University of Bremen. From 2013 to 2016, Patrizia Nanz was head of the research area "Culture of Participation" at the Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities (KWI) in Essen. She is the founder of the European Institute for Public Participation (EIPP) and in 2009 was a co-founder of Participedia, a global collaborative wiki platform for democratic innovations. She was a member of the Scientific Committee of the World Forum for Democracy, hosted annually by the Council of Europe.
Her main areas of research are public participation and sustainability transformations (climate change, biotechnology, energy transition, final storage of nuclear waste), democratic theory (transnational governance and the European integration), open government and innovation of administration.
Education and early career
Through a scholarship awarded to gifted individuals by the Bavarian State Ministry of Education, Science and the Arts, Patrizia Nanz studied philosophy at Munich School of Philosophy and history and literary criticism as well as philosophy at universities in Munich, Milan and Frankfurt Rhine-Main between 1984 and 1990. During that time she also trained as a journalist at the IfP Catholic Media School in Munich and undertook internships with various newspapers (including an internship with the Arts & Culture section of the Frankfurter Allgemeinen Zeitung). Her thesis on the philosophy of language was supervised by Jürgen Habermas.
From 1991, Nanz worked for several years as an editor of science and non-fiction publications for German publishing house S. Fischer Verlag and Milan-based publishers Feltrinelli. Following a research term at McGill University, where she attended lectures by Charles Taylor, Nanz commenced her doctoral studies in political science at the European University Institute in Florence in 1997. Her doctoral thesis, on the European public sphere, was published in 2006 (examiners: Philippe C. Schmitter, Jürgen Habermas, Charles Sabel, Peter Wagner).
In 2002, after working as a research associate with the Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods in Bonn, and completing a post-doctoral fellowship at the Centre for the Study of Democracy, University of Westminster (London) researching on the subject of “Democracy, Deliberation and Learning at the Transnational Level: Risk Regulation in the European Union and the World Trade Organisation”, Nanz was appointed to a professorship at the University of Bremen with a focus on political theory. She was a guest researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Cambridge, Mass.) in 2003 and a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg, Berlin Institute for Advanced Study in 2005–06.
Research and other activities
Nanz’s main areas of research are the European integration, democratic innovations, collaborative government and public participation, and sustainability transformations (climate change, biotechnology, energy transition, long-term storage solutions for radioactive waste).