Dr. Elke Kellner is a Lecturer and Co-Head for Sustainability at the School of Business, Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts, Switzerland. Her research focuses on the governance of transformations of social-ecological systems towards sustainability. She is particularly interested in the governance of trade-off situations in sustainability transitions. Her recent research examines the acceleration of transformation processes and how acceleration creates new and intensified trade-offs. Her overarching goal is to translate knowledge into action by designing research through co-production processes and by informing policies and decision-making that improve outcomes for both people and nature.
From 2022 to 2025, she held a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Individual Global Fellowship within the Horizon 2020 European research programme. As part of this fellowship, she conducted research and teaching stays at the School of Sustainability at Arizona State University (US), the School of Geography, Development & Environment at the University of Arizona (US), and the Wyss Academy for Nature at the University of Bern (CH). In 2024, she was a Nominated Visiting Scholar at the Ostrom Workshop at Indiana University Bloomington (US). From 2020 to 2021, she worked as a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research (WSL), ETH Zurich domain (CH), and holds a PhD in Climate Science from the Oeschger Centre for Climate Change Research and the Institute of Geography, University of Bern (CH).
She is co-leading the Working Group on Governance of Social-Ecological Systems and is a member of the Taskforce on the Sustainable Development Goals and the Taskforce on Knowledge Cumulation.
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