Short presentation

Mine Islar is an associate professor in political ecology and environmental justice. She obtained her PhD degree in sustainability science, LUCSUS, Lund University. Her expertise is on transformative governance, social and environmental justice as well as collective action towards sustainability in both urban and rural settings mostly in the Himalaya region.

Apart from this, she also acts as a scientific expert in UN Intergovermental Panel on Biodiversity and Ecosystem services (IPBES) as a Lead Author (2017-2020) for  policy tools and instruments for the Values Assessment and Global Assessment of Biodiversity where she led sections on governance challenges of SDGs with a special focus on economic growth and its potential implications on biodiversity.

She leads multiple research projects and supervise PhDs and postdocs.

Research Projects

NATURICE

Exploring plural values of human-nature relationships in glacierized environments.

The project is funded by Swedish Research Council for Sustainable Development (FORMAS) and will deliver high quality research along with relevant policy recommendations. The project responds to FORMAS’ call for integrated knowledge of climate change, ecosystems and society, and addresses the need for in-depth study of the human-nature relationship by crossing boundaries between different research fields ecosystem services and valuation, political ecology and glaciology.

Around the world, glaciers have been retreating at unprecedented rates. Glaciers affect people and societalrelations worldwide on many levels, whether by influencing mountain ecosystems, providing water fordrinking and agriculture, generating hydroelectric energy, determining safety for downstream communities, ordriving tourism economies and other types of livelihoods. Thisproject’s main purpose is to examine how values and human-nature relationships are affected by these challenges through a trans-regional study of glacierized environments in Scandinavia and the Himalayas.

This project is leading a key research theme  Glacierized environments.

Post-growth welfare systems

Funded by Lund University Agenda 2030

Welfare systems in OECD countries including Sweden face combined challenges such as rising inequality, demographic changes and environmental crises that are likely to drive up welfare demand. Economic growth is no longer a sustainable solution to these problems, since only very few countries have managed to decouple economic growth from ecological footprints and greenhouse gas emissions, and even where this has been achieved, the rates of emission decline are too slow to match the Paris climate targets. It is therefore imperative to consider how welfare systems may cope with the mentioned challenges in the absence of economic growth.

This project applies methodological pluralism, building on literature and policy reviews, statistical analyses, scenario building and expert forums. Based on cooperation with local, national and European stakeholders as well as with an International Academic Advisory Board featuring some the world’s leading experts in the field, this project develops and assesses ways of decoupling welfare from economic growth by focusing both on the ‘supply’ (fiscal and taxation-related) and ‘demand’ (labour market, health and care sector, community, education and environmental and spatial planning-related) aspects of welfare provision. The project brings together researchers from Social Sciences (Prof Max Koch, [email protected], and Dr Mine Islar, Lund University Centre for Sustainability Studies, [email protected]),  Environmentalscience (Dr Johanna Alkan Olsson, [email protected]) and Economics and Management (Dr Alexander Paulsson, [email protected]). 

Double transitions of energy in Nepal

Funded by VR Development grant (2023-2027)

The purpose of the project is to advance knowledge on the relationships between energy transition and energy access in the context of Nepal. Energy transition in Nepal runs along two parallel processes: a transition from low-access to high access to modern energy for meeting the demands of the population, and a transition from fossil-fuel based energy to renewable energy. However, little has been known about how these two processes relate to each other. By defining access as the ability to derive benefits from energy sources, we aim to identify the differentiated patterns of means, relations, and processes that enable/disable small businesses and households’ opportunities to have access, alleviate poverty and derive benefits from energy transition.