Prof Susan Owens is Emeritus Professor of Environment and Policy and Fellow Emerita of Newnham College and has researched and published widely in the field of environmental governance.
Her current projects are concerned with relations between science and politics, and with the role of argument, evidence, ideas and advice in policy formation and change. She has also worked extensively on interpretations of sustainable development in theory and practice, and has been interested in connections between environmental planning conflicts (especially those concerned with contentious technologies and infrastructures) and developments in wider domains of public policy. She has supervised many PhD students on environmental and science/policy topics.
She was appointed an OBE in 1998 and was a recipient of the Royal Geographical Society’s ‘Back’ Award in 2000. She holds an Honorary Professorship at the University of Copenhagen. For the academic year 2008-09 she was the King Carl XVI Gustaf Professor of Environmental Science, hosted by Stockholm University’s Resilience Centre and the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), Stockholm. She was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2011 and received an Honorary Doctorate from KTH, Stockholm, in 2012.