ProfessorGary Kass

Gary's research interests focus on the underpinning capabilities, competencies, capacities and conditions required to make progress on sustainability. These include core competencies such as systems thinking, foresight and strategy and critical capacities such as linking knowledge with action, facilitating system transformation and promoting equity and effective governance. 

Gary has a particular interest in how human-nature values are shaped and how these influence policy design, decision-making and policy implementation. Gary also has a particular interest in how futures, systems and compelxity are conceived and enacted in sustainability scholarship, policy and practice, and how the timescales over which sustainability is construed affect decision-making. 

Gary is also active in scholarship around the effectiveness of the science-policy interface, exploring how research and other knowledge forms intersect with policy and decision-making, influencing approaches to knowledge exchange, knowledge brokering and achieving 'impact'. Gary is currently exploring how such 'impact' might be investigated when considering the diverse, complex and dynamic system of actors seeking to achieve sustainability transformation, with a particular focus (at present) on the influence of professional bodies as policy actors.