John Robinson
Current affiliations
- Presidential Advisor on the Environment, Climate Change and Sustainability
Areas of interest
- Academic/community partnerships
- Climate change
- Participatory community engagement
- Scenario analysis and futures studies
- Social and technological change
- Sustainability
- Sustainable Buildings and Cities
Biography
John Robinson is a professor at the University of Toronto's Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy and the School of the Environment. He is an honorary professor with the Institute for Resources, Environment & Sustainability at the University of British Columbia, and adjunct professor with Copenhagen Business School. He currently serves as U of T's Presidential Advisor on the Environment, Climate Change and Sustainability.
Professor Robinson's research focuses on the intersection of climate change mitigation, adaptation and sustainability; the use of visualization, modelling and citizen engagement to explore sustainable futures; sustainable buildings and urban design; the role of the university in contributing to sustainability; creating partnerships for sustainability with non-academic partners; and generally, the intersection of sustainability, sociology and technological change, behaviour change and the community engagement process.
Select publications
Books
- Sustainability in an Imaginary World: Art and the Question of Agency by David Maggs and John Robinson (2020, Routledge).
Journal Articles
- Robinson, J. 2021. Sustainability as transmutation: an alchemical interpretation of a transformation to sustainability. Sustainability Science. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11625-021-00987-y.
- Robinson, J., et al., 2020. Meeting the climate change challenge: local government climate action in British Columbia, Canada, Climate Policy, 20:7, 866-880, DOI:10.1080/14693062.2019.1651244.
- Robinson, J., and Slater, K. 2020. Social Learning and Transdisciplinary Co-Production: A Social Practice Approach. Sustainability 12. Published online September 2020. doi:10.3390/su12187511.
- Robinson, J., and Williams, S. 2020. Measuring sustainability: An evaluation framework for sustainability transition experiments. Environmental Science and Policy 103. Published online November 2019. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envsci.2019.10.012.
