Nina Gmeiner is a research assistant and PhD-Student in the project RightSeeds – commons-based rights on seeds and cultivars for a social-ecological transformation of plant production. Her background studies were Business Psychology (Bachelors, Bielefeld) and Sustainability Economics and Management (Master, Oldenburg). She completed her Master with a thesis on networking as a success factor for community-supported agriculture and started her scientific career in the project nascent – new opportunities for a sustainable food system through transformative enterprise models. There she carried out transdisciplinary research on questions concerning transformation towards sustainable global food systems.

In RightSeeds she works on a dissertation in economic ethics. Her goal is to identify and describe the influence of different property regimes on the well-being of agricultural actors. The practical focus is commons-based seed production in the Global North and South. As a theoretical background she uses the Capability Approach by Amartya Sen.

Her main research interests are ethical, sociological and economic perspectives on the food sector. Complementary to her work with the Capability Approach on (New) Commons she is interested in the critical analysis of power structures and political hegemony.