Our interdisciplinary School brings together renowned international faculty engaged in cutting-edge research and high-quality teaching. We are dedicated to addressing the challenges of globalization and sustainability through comprehensive knowledge and strategies for sustainability and governance. 

Sustainability Transition Research:  

Degrowth: Degrowth research focuses on how to create a just, equal, convivial, joyful and sustainable society that has liberated itself from the need to perpetually grow. It is trying to identify social and political pathways of transition that reduces the societal use of materials and energy, while improving quality of life. 

Sustainable Tourism and Regional Development Policy: ourism, for many cities and regions, is a propulsive source of economic vitality, and its economic health can profoundly influence the course of regional development and sustainability. In the last few decades there has been a paradigm shift in how society views the relationships among tourism, development, and sustainability. There is now greater emphasis on reducing social disparities, maintaining acceptable levels of quality of life for citizens, and maintaining environmental quality, biopersity, and the conservation of non-renewable resources. Levels of tourism that negatively impact the environment, the host community and the quality of public services and infrastructure will, over time, erode the appeal of the city or region as a tourist destination as well as the quality of life for its residents and can lead to loss of economic vitality. We address such questions as: How can tourism and regional development strategies be coordinated to achieve sustainable development? 

Governance for Innovation and Sustainable Development: Governance for innovation and sustainable development is characterized by partnerships and networks of different institutional actors, and emphasizes stakeholder participation and partnership as a steering mechanism. As such it focuses on multi-level and multi-actor dimensions. Research on how mechanisms of one governance regime influence and/or overwhelm the impacts of another is top on the School’s agenda. 

The Role of Higher Education in Sustainable Development: In the globalized, knowledge-based economy of the 21st century, organizations that produce and 

disseminate knowledge have a critical role to play in assisting cities, regions, and nations reach and sustain economic competitiveness. How do higher education institutions respond to this challenge by expanding their activities beyond teaching and basic research to include economic, business, and technological development? 

Statistical Methods: For example, strong knowledge and new methods have been developed by the School’s faculty when it comes to network analysis, or the probabilistic test theory next to the more commonly used, but also highly criticized classical test theory, the latter one being preferred by psychologists especially when it comes to measurement construct developments which is a highly important topic for the socio-empirical sciences. Another focus lies on the tailored development of data mining techniques for text processing tasks being used to answer scientometric research questions, or to automatically detect emotions by means of verbal emotion recognition, so called sentiment detection. 

Sustainability Analytics: cutting-edge analytical sustainability techniques and models; analysis and visualization of global environmental, social and economic datasets; quantifying and ranking spatial environmental impacts and performance; sustainability impact assessment; decision support systems both data- and theory-driven; sustainable digital transformation, etc. 

Program and Public Policy Evaluation: The expansion and deepening of new forms of governance, particularly for economic development and environmental sustainability, comes with increased demands for accountability regarding the use of public resources. How effective are public and public-private initiatives in achieving their intended outcomes? What types of organizational structures are most suitable under contingent conditions? How effective is the implementation process and how responsive are organizations to perse needs? 

Our faculty is involved in a broad variety of collaborative third –party funded research projects in their respective fields of expertise. Find more here. 

• TOURISM - Case-study on "Inner Areas" post COVID-19 
• A Digital Well-Being Index for Vienna 
• Carrying capacity methodology: Iveragh Peninsula (Irish case study) 
• Carrying capacity methodology for tourism 
• i-conn Interdisciplinary connectivity: Understanding and managing complex systems using connectivity science 
• EPOCH – Event Prediction from Hybrid Datasets 
• EcoMove – Predicting Mobility Bottlenecks 
• Living conditions, quality of life, and subjective well-being in regions: A methodological pilot study with explorative interviewing and quantitative measurement 
• Indigenous Communities Land Use and Tropical Deforestation (INCLUDE) 
• VorTEIL Energy Flagship Region 
• Making Vienna a Leading Startup Center of Europe 
• Evaluation of tertiary education in Vienna 
• Vienna as a Region of Knowledge: Increasing the Generation of University Spin-offs 
• Organization, Implementation, and Governance of State Economic Development Cluster Strategies 
• The Pathways and Challenges of University Engagement: Comparative Case Studies in Austria - Role of universities in regional governance 
• Success Factors in Job-retraining Programs: The Case of the Bioworks Program in North Carolina, USA 
• future.scapes - Global Change and its Influence on Landscape and Society- Scenarios of Future Transition and Solution Strategies to Mitigate Negative Effects 
• Energy Efficiency and the Real Estate Economy