Gijs Diercks Senior Researcher & Advisor

Gijs Diercks (he/him) is a senior researcher and advisor. At DRIFT, the core of his work is to develop knowledge—together with people who work on transitions every day—that actually enables action. For Gijs, knowledge is not an abstract end point, but a crucial link to meaningful action. It can only play that role when it emerges from practice and is internalized and made one’s own by the people who work with it. This requires ways of working in which analysis and action, thinking and doing, are continuously connected.

Whether this takes place in advisory projects, academic research, or education is, for him, largely beside the point. In all cases, it revolves around exploring and strengthening the same dynamic: how knowledge emerges, how it provides direction, and how it enables people to take action within their existing context.

In recent years, Gijs has worked on renewing how knowledge development takes shape in and with practice. At the same time, he has developed a number of substantive lines of work around recurring transition challenges, such as the role of public officials, questions of phase-out and decline, and how real breakthroughs come about. In his work, he consistently connects these strands: for him, new ways of developing knowledge are not an end in themselves, but a precondition for making progress on precisely these kinds of complex issues.