Barry Ness

Barry Ness is an associate professor at the Centre for Sustainability Studies, LUCSUS, at Lund University in Sweden. He is also the director of the Skåne Local Interaction Platform of the Mistra Urban Futures Project and the editor-in-chief of the journal Challenges in Sustainability. Barry’s recent research interests include understanding and fostering sustainable societal change through living labs and transition experiments, working in collaboration with regional city officials, small businesses, and other actors outside of academia. He is a work package leader for the Globally and Locally-sustainable Food-Water-Energy Innovation in Urban Living Labs, GLOCULL, project, and a work package co-leader for the 7-year Transform project. Other research Barry is currently involved in includes solid waste management in Kisumu, Kenya. Barry’s past research is diverse. It has concentrated on how simple, sustainable innovations can be more effectively diffused in rural areas in sub-Saharan Africa, on knowledge systems around direct trade coffee production chains, and on the governance of large land acquisition projects in Africa. His PhD research concentrated on understanding the variety of tools that exist for sustainability assessment, conceptualizing complex problems of sustainability based on complex interactions in the case of the sugar production system in Sweden.