Rate My Professor Janet Stephenson

Janet Stephenson is Research Professor and Postgraduate Co-ordinator at the Centre for Sustainability, University of Otago. Her academic background is in sociology, planning, and human geography. She completed her PhD at the University of Otago in 2005, with the thesis titled Values in Space and Time: A Framework for Understanding Places-people Relationships. Prior to her current role, she taught in the Department of Geography at the University of Otago from 2002 to 2008 and joined the Centre for Sustainability as a Senior Research Fellow at the end of 2008. She served as Director of the Centre for Sustainability from 2011 to 2021.

Stephenson specializes in collaborative, interdisciplinary research addressing complex sustainability issues, including landscape values, energy and transport transitions, environmental management, and climate change adaptation, with an emphasis on the importance of culture across these areas. She has led or co-led numerous projects, such as Innovations for Climate Adaptation (2022-2024, Co-Principal Investigator), Kainga and Climate Change (2019-2024, Associate Investigator), Climate-Adaptive Communities (2018-2019, Principal Investigator), Sustainable Seas National Science Challenge (2017-2019, Science Leadership Team member), Energy Cultures 2, and Green Grid. Key publications include her book Culture and Sustainability: Exploring Stability and Transformation with the Cultures Framework (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023); "The Cultural Values Model: An integrated approach to values in landscapes" (Landscape and Urban Planning, 2008); "Energy cultures: A framework for understanding energy behaviours" (Energy Policy, 2010); and "Engaging with communities for climate change adaptation: Introducing Community Development for Adaptation" (Policy Quarterly, 2020). She delivered her Inaugural Professorial Lecture titled Culture and Sustainability in 2021 and has supervised over a dozen PhD students to completion. Stephenson serves on the steering committee for the University of Otago Energy Research Centre, the Advisory Board of INCLUDE (a Norwegian research centre), and the Coastal People: Southern Skies collaboration.