Julia Tschersich is a research assistant and PhD student in the project RightSeeds and is responsible for the working package on ‘Governance’. Her dissertation examines the embedding of Seed Commons in the complex Multi-Level Governance system of Biodiversity and Intellectual Property Rights. She analyzes how seed initiatives can act as social movements to create empowering institutions for a social-ecological transformation of plant cultivation. She has recently completed a research stay at the University of California, Santa Cruz, at the Environmental Studies Department. Previously, she obtained a Master degree in ‘Sustainability Economics and Management’ at the University of Oldenburg and a Bachelor degree in ‘International Relations’ at the Technical University of Dresden. Her main research interests lie in the fields of Social-Ecological Transformation, Environmental Governance, Institutional Change, Degrowth, Social Movements and (Seed) Commons.