The Norway-Pacific Ocean-Climate Scholarship Programme (N-POC) is an ambitious partnership in research and PhD training between two geographically remote, structurally different, but thematically convergent institutions of research and higher education: the University of Bergen (UiB) in Norway, and the regional University of the South Pacific (USP). N-POC is among the first endorsed UN Ocean Decade Actions.
N-POC is funded for 2021-2026 by Norway’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) and the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation (Norad). The programme comprises up to 22 fully funded PhD scholarships at the USP within ocean and climate research, ranging from the natural sciences, to law, to the social sciences and humanities.
N-POC has three main objectives:
- To build a strong interdisciplinary Pacific cohort of PhD researchers to address urgent challenges for ocean and climate;
- To build new multidisciplinary Pacific research on the ocean-climate nexus for regional and global policy impact;
- To build enduring partnerships between researchers and universities in Norway and the Pacific Islands.
N-POC builds on complementarity between the two universities. UiB is one of Norway’s largest universities and has a strategic research focus on ocean, climate and global challenges. USP is the Pacific Islands region’s own multi-country university with 12 member states, and has a focus on ocean and climate from it’s regional position at the frontline of climate change.
The two universities have a long record of collaboration on research projects, performing arts, student exchange and shared initiatives of science-driven ocean and climate diplomacy. The collaboration between the two universities is managed through a broad Memorandum of Understanding.
The N-POC programme is system-wide, with a main focus on the USP Laucala campus in Suva, Fiji. N-POC involves all schools and centres, and is managed by the Research Office. All PhD candidates are to be based at the USP, but will be supervised jointly by researchers from both universities, and will receive a joint degree, under a bi-institutional PhD agreement signed by UiB and USP.
All candidates have been invited to a dedicated summer school programme at the University of Bergen, and at the United Nations headquarters in New York, in 2024.
For further information about our partner university, please visit: https://www.uib.no/en/n-poc
