Susanne Keesman is part of the Navigating Deep Transitions Flagship Team of professor Johan Schot at the Utrecht University Centre for Global Challenges (UGlobe). The research portfolio focuses on global sustainability transitions, with an international project team located at universities and research institutes in the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Spain, Austria and Estonia.

Deep Transitions Lab

Deep Transitions 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.

Between 2020 and 2022 the research team collaborated with an international panel of private and public investors to develop a new transformative investment philosophy. As project manager and director of the Global Investors Panel, Susanne was one of the co-authors of the investment philosophy, which proposes new principles, tools and metrics for financing long-term system change and a deep transition towards sustainability.

Since 2023, she is programme director of the Deep Transitions Lab. Using the Transformative Investment Philosophy, the lab aims to establish a niche in the finance industry and contribute to its scaling. The lab works with a group of public and private investors that want to move away from a case-by-case focus that favours system optimisation and instead directs investments towards the root causes of unsustainable practices that increase social inequality.

See the Transformative Investment website to learn more about the lab, the research underpinning our work, and to download the transformative investment philosophy.

TIPC

The Transformative Innovation Policy Consortium (TIPC) is a sister project of the Deep Transitions lab. 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 executes a policy experimentation programme 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 and obtained her research MA from Leiden University in 2014. From 2014 until March 2020 she worked with Professor Beatrice de Graaf as project coordinator of the ERC-funded project SECURE and a number of other research projects. In addition, she was manager of the IOS-hub Security in Open Societies and coordinator of the section History of International Relations.