Dr. Elke Kellner is a Marie-Curie Fellow at the Arizona State University, US, focusing on the transformation of social-ecological systems towards sustainability. Using institutional analysis from a systems thinking and commons perspective, the aim of her work is to understand how complex multi-level trade-offs are managed in multi-actor, multi-interest governance systems. The goal is to bring knowledge into action by designing research through co-production processes and to inform policies and decision-makers that improve outcomes for people and nature. She holds a PhD in Climate Science from the Oeschger Centre for Climate Change Research, University of Bern, Switzerland, and an MSc in Biochemistry from the Free University of Berlin, Germany. In her PostDoc at the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research (WSL), she focused on sustainable water governance under climate change, transcending multiple levels, scales, sectors, and actor types, including Water-Energy-Food Nexus. She has published on Polycentric Governance and the NAS approach and has been using the Social-Ecological Action Situations (SE-AS) framework.
She is a member of the Taskforce on the Sustainable Development Goals and the Taskforce on Knowledge Cumulation.