Stockholm Environment Institute

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Åsa Persson

Research Director and Deputy Director

Expertise: environmental governance and policies, Climate change adaptation, SDGs
asa.persson@sei.org
@Perssonasa
+46 73 707 8561

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Åsa Persson is Research Director and Deputy Director at SEI.

Dr Persson is a social scientist and expert on governance for sustainable development. She is Adjunct Associate Professor (Docent) at the Department for Thematic Studies, Environmental Change, Linköping University. In 2020, she was appointed by the UN Secretary-General to the Independent Group of Scientists to draft the 2023 UN Global Sustainable Development Report.

Her research focuses on global governance, including the implementation of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the global governance dimensions of climate change adaptation, and the planetary boundaries framework. In the SDG context, she has particularly focused on research and advisory work for better policy integration and coherence across the goals.

As Research Director, she leads the work of the SEI Global Research Committee, which develops and oversees SEI’s core-funded research, and is a member of the SEI Executive Team.

She is a member of the External Advisory Board of the York Environmental Sustainability Institute and of the Swedish National Committee on Global Environmental Change convened by the Royal Academy of Sciences. She is a member of the Lead Faculty of the Earth System Governance project, the largest social science research network on governance of global environmental change.

Through her research, she has provided advice and commissioned reports to many organisations, like the UN, OECD, the European Commission and the Swedish government. Her research has been published in journals such as Nature, Nature Climate Change, Environmental Science and Policy, and Climate Policy. She has won several competitive research grants from the Swedish Research Council for Sustainable Development (Formas), EU, Mistra and Swedish Research Council.

Particular topics that her research has addressed include environmental policy integration and mainstreaming, climate adaptation finance, global governance of climate adaptation, governance implications of planetary boundaries, and implementation of international environmental agreements.

Her early research focused on the national level and analysed concepts and tools like “new” environmental policy instruments, strategic environmental assessment, and regulatory impact assessment. Thematically, her research has typically had a general focus on environment, climate and sustainable development, but she has also done specific analysis of climate adaptation, chemicals management, sustainable consumption, and waste policy.

Åsa first joined SEI in 2001. She received her PhD degree in environmental policy from the London School of Economics & Political Science in 2007. After completing her PhD degree in 2007, she has had several roles within SEI, as project leader, group leader and theme leader. She was a Post-Doc Researcher with the Stockholm Resilience Centre in 2010-2012, and Visiting Fellow at ANU Climate Change Institute, Canberra, in 2010 and at Macquarie University, Sydney, in 2017.

Åsa Persson

Q&A with Åsa Persson, new Research Director

Åsa Persson takes up the role of Research Director and Deputy Director on 1 June. In this Q&A she describes her aspirations and leadership goals.

Feature
1 June 2018

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Åsa Persson high res
Åsa Persson high res : 684 KB