Fellows

Karin Bäckstrand is a Professor in Environmental Social Science at the Department of Political Science at Stockholm University. 

Her primary research revolves around global environmental politics, the role of science in environmental decision-making, the politics of climate change and the democratic legitimacy of global governance. Bäckstrand received her doctorate in Political Science at Lund University in 2001. Between 2002 and 2004 she held a postdoctoral position as a Wallenberg Fellow for Environment and Sustainability at the Laboratory for Energy and Environment at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 2013, she was visiting scholar at the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Oxford and was a senior member at St. Anthony’s’ College.

Bäckstrand’s work is published in journals Global Environmental Politics, European Journal of International Relations, Global Environmental Change, Journal of Environmental Policy and Planning, Environmental Politics, Journal of European Public Policy. Her recent books are The Research Handbook on Climate Governance (co-edited with Eva Lövbrand, Edward Elgar, 2015) and Rethinking the Green State: Environmental Governance towards Climate and Sustainability Transition (with Annica Kronsell, Routledge, 2015). Bäckstrand is Editor of the domain Climate Policy and Governance at Wiley’s Interdisciplinary Review (WIREs) Climate Change, a leading journal for climate studies.

Bäckstrand has been awarded grants and led several research projects funded by the Swedish Research Council, Formas, Riksbanken Jubileumsfund, the Swedish Foundation for Strategic Environmental Research (Mistra), The Swedish Energy Agency, Wennergren Foundation, EU-FP7 and the Leverhulme Foundation. She serves on the board of the Norwegian Research Council’s 10-year research program on Climate Change, the Mistra Program New Governance for Sustainable Development in the Artic, and the social science faculty representative on the Board of the Stockholm Resilience Center. She is Senior Faculty of the Earth System Governance Project, which now is organized under the Future Earth.