Prof. Dr. Kristine Kern (1959 – 2025)

It is with great sadness and sorrow that we learnt of the death of our colleague and friend Kristine. With Prof. Dr. Kristine Kern’s passing, the academic community and the IRS have lost an outstanding and internationally highly respected researcher.

Born in Stuttgart in 1959 and raised in neighbouring Backnang, Kristine Kern completed an apprenticeship in local government administration after leaving high school. This background helped to shape her research interests in public administration and her critical view of hierarchical structures. Kristine Kern then studied administrative sciences, economics and political science in Stuttgart, Tübingen and Berlin. In 1998, she completed her doctorate in political science at the Free University of Berlin, for which she received the Joachim Tiburtius Prize from the Berlin state government. Her doctoral thesis examined the diffusion of political innovations in multi-level systems, illustrated by the example of environmental policy in the USA. This was followed by positions at the John F. Kennedy Institute at the Free University of Berlin and at the Berlin Social Science Center (WZB) before she set out into the wider world: her numerous stations abroad have taken her to the USA (University of Minnesota), Sweden (Södertörn University), the Netherlands (Wageningen University) and Finland (Åbo Akademi University), among other places. She remained closely connected to Åbo Akademi in Turku, Finland, where she held a visiting professorship until 2020.

Kristine Kern had worked at the IRS since 2012, initially in the research department "Institutional Change and Regional Public Goods" and later in the research group "Urban Sustainability Transitions", which she played a leading role in shaping and developing. In addition, she held a temporary professorship at the Faculty of Economics and Social Sciences at the University of Potsdam. Since 2023, she has also been a guest researcher at the Institute of Local Government Studies (KWI) at the University of Potsdam.

Unquestionably, Kristine Kern made a significant contribution to research on environmental and climate policy, partly inspired by her own politicisation through exposure to the environmental and peace movements during the 1980s. Through her research on the diffusion of environmental policy innovations, such as the adoption of municipal action plans for Local Agenda 21, Kristine Kern became established as an urban climate policy scholar, a field of research that she has developed and shaped nationally and internationally: for example, her co-authored articles with Harriet Bulkeley in the mid-2000s are now part of the standard literature in this field. It is largely thanks to Kristine Kern that the city is also established in political science research as a central actor in climate policy. How can cities be pioneers in climate governance? How do city networks help to spread climate innovations in multi-level systems? How do environmental policy innovations spread across any kind of jurisdictional boundary  (i.e., not just between nation-states)? And how are such diffusion processes integrated into socio-spatial processes, for example, energy system transformation or climate adaptation? What role do macroregional strategies and transnational city networks play in Europe? What might pathways to urban transformations look like? Kristine Kern has provided crucial answers to all of these and many other questions, and shaped research fields in the process. Her enormous research achievements made Kristine Kern an internationally sought-after expert, as shown by her numerous activities as a reviewer for research projects (including for ERC, Horizon 2020, JPI Urban Europe, and FORMAS).

Alongside her countless academic achievements, we will remember Kristine above all as an inspiring, warm-hearted woman of strong character who was always determined and straightforward in her commitment to the concerns of her colleagues, and in her support of young researchers.

Dear Kristine, we miss you very much already!

Wolfgang Haupt, Elisa Kochskämper, Peter Eckersley, Peter Ulrich, Martina Leppler and Ludger Gailing