Susanne Keesman works as project manager within the Navigating Deep Transitions Team of professor Johan Schot at the Utrecht University Centre for Global Challenges. The research portfolio focuses on global sustainability transitions, while the international project team is located at universities and research institutes in the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Spain, Austria and Estonia.
Deep Transitions Research Project
Susanne is project manager and panel director for Deep Transitions, and is one of the co-authors of the investment philosophy. For more information, see the Deep Transitions project website and Transformative Investment website to download the philosophy.
Tremendous long-term investments are urgently needed for tackling the interrelated challenges of climate change, biodiversity loss and growing inequality. At the same time, simply investing ‘more’ has proven not to be sufficient to address these challenges. Many sustainability-focused investors are aware of this and are looking for ways to invest in systems change. However, they are searching for the theoretical foundation, tools and practices to guide their investments in a direction that can make a true and lasting difference. The Deep Transitions project set out to find a solution to this challenge.
The project is an innovative and ambitious global transdisciplinary research project that strives to understand how the unsustainable systems our societies are built on emerged, in order to help redirect those crucial drivers of change into a sustainable direction. The research team collaborates with an international panel of private and public investors to develop a new transformative investment philosophy. On 16 November 2022 the project published an Investment Philosophy with 12 principles of transformative investment, designed to aid investors who want to move beyond business as usual and system optimisation, to achieve profound ad lasting systems change.
Earlier projects
The Transformative Innovation Policy Consortium (TIPC) is a global network of researchers, policymakers and funding agencies in 8 countries across three continents. Its members seek to address the UN's Sustainable Development Goals. TIPC executed a policy experimentation programme between 2018 and 2022 in order to incorporate system change in a public policy context. Within TIPC, Susanne was project manager of the MOTION and VINNOVA projects.
Background and previous experience
Susanne is a historian by training (Leiden University, Research MA). From 2014 until March 2020 she worked with Professor Beatrice de Graaf as project coordinator, and was responsible for, amongst others, the ERC-funded project SECURE (2014-2019). She was furthermore coordinator of the section History of International Relations (2016-2019), and manager of the IOS-hub Security in Open Societies (2017-2020).