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The Ecological Research Network (Ecornet) is a network of non-university, non-profit institutes of environmental and sustainability research in Germany. Founded in 2011, the aim of the network is to help shape social change towards sustainability and to provide a scientific foundation for it.

Topics and methods
Research at Ecornet institutes is structured along thematic fields such as consumption, climate, energy, biodiversity, mobility or resources, including water and land use. The institutes work on the individual topics in an interdisciplinary, application-oriented and socially relevant manner. They see themselves as a "critical counterpart to the strongly discipline-oriented research landscape and established policy advice, combined with an explicit claim to design". All Ecornet Institutes share the consistently transdisciplinary research approach, in which actors from politics, civil society and business are involved in the research process from the very beginning. Several of the Ecornet Institutes played a pioneering role in Germany in the consistent application of transdisciplinary methods in science. In addition, the Institute for Social-Ecological Research continues to elaborate this research approach in its own theoretical research focus. The institutes set a significant accent in the field of social-ecological research. Social-ecological in this context means an orientation towards serious social sustainability problems and a combination of social scientific, economic and ecological perspectives. Other theoretical approaches and methods include: transformative science, real-world laboratory research, sustainability assessment, technology assessment, and participatory futurology. In addition to research, Ecornet Institutes are active to varying degrees in policy consulting and environmental education.

Members
The eight institutional members of Ecornet are:

A total of over 800 employees work at the institutes. The institutes are mainly financed by third-party funds for research projects, with most of the funding coming from public institutions.

Also see

 * Social ecology
 * Transdisciplinarity

Literature

 * Thomas Jahn, R. Andreas Kraemer: Wegbereiter der Nachhaltigkeitsforschung. In: Ökologisches Wirtschaften. Nr. 2/2013, p. 24–25.

Weblinks

 * Official Website: www.ecornet.eu