Meet the Advisory Board: Siddharth Sareen
The PLUS Change Project has welcomed a third Advisory Board member, Siddharth Sareen. As an interdisciplinary social scientist, he specialises in the governance of energy transitions.
Tell us about yourself!
From autumn 2024 onwards, I am a research professor at the Fridtjof Nansen Institute in Oslo, and also serve in a Professor II position at the Centre for Climate and Energy Transformation at the University of Bergen in Norway. My background as an interdisciplinary environmental social scientist spans human geography, development studies and political ecology. I work on the governance of energy transitions across the complex, cross-sectoral value chain from extractive zones to energy end-use.
How does your work correspond with PLUS Change?
My interests in cross-sectoral governance, the role of metrics in enabling accountable governance, and the ethnography of transitions at multiple and nested spatial scales are aspects germane to PLUS Change. Having worked at numerous academic institutions in seven countries and engaged empirically with the changes of our time in numerous diverse settings, I find the setup of this project one that opens up to exciting possibilities for generative, hands-on impact.
Why were you interested in working with this project?
I find the co-productive approach central to the project timely and convincing. As a premise, it resonates with my sensibilities to work with issues of transformation in ontologically consistent ways that are part of being the change that we wish to see. Emulating, nurturing and espousing conditions for cross-sectoral governance that can bring about sustainability transformation is a commitment that requires this sort of transdisciplinary collaboration across sectors and contexts.
What are you looking forward to in the coming years?
We are at a critical conjuncture as societies faced with pressing challenges linked to climate change, energy transitions, and different ways of valuing our socioecological abundance even as we navigate its increasingly evident limits. I look forward to building bridges across diverse epistemic communities and indeed between places where transformation is afoot.
Photo Credit: Young Academy of Norway on the AYF.