John Robinson

John Robinson is a Professor at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy and the School of the Environment at the University of Toronto. He is also an Adjunct Professor at Copenhagen Business School. At U of T, he is Presidential Advisor on the Environment, Climate Change and Sustainability. Dr. Robinson’s research focuses on the intersection of climate change mitigation, adaptation and sustainability; 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; the history and philosophy of sustainability; and, generally, the intersection of sustainability, social and technological change, behaviours and practices, and community engagement processes.

I am looking for grad students in the following areas:

• Sustainable building design and operation – with a focus on the behavioural interface: building/inhabitant hybrids
• The role of the university in helping the City of Toronto achieve its climate change goals
• ontological agency and sustainability I am also interested in issues related to:
• socio-technical systems change (transitions and transformations), and
• community engagement processes at the urban scale, using transdisciplinary co-production of knowledge approaches, including evaluation of societal impacts of sustainability action projects.

Publications

Robinson, J. “Sustainability as transmutation: an alchemical interpretation of a transformation to sustainability”, Sustainability Science, (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11625-021-00987-y

Slater, K. and Robinson, J. (2020), “Social Learning and Transdisciplinary Co-Production: A Social Practice Approach”, Sustainability, 12(18), 7511; doi:10.3390/su12187511. link

Jost, F., Dale, A., Newell, R., Robinson, J. (2020), “Evaluating development path changes using a novel climate action assessment framework in three municipalities in British Columbia, Canada”, Environmental Science and Policy, 114, 410–421.

Williams, S. and Robinson, J., (2020) “Measuring sustainability: An evaluation framework for sustainability transition experiments”, Environmental Science and Policy, 103, 58-66. link

Brugmann, R., Côté, N., Postma, N., Shaw, E., Pal, D., and Robinson, J. (2019) “Expanding Student Engagement in Sustainability: Using SDG- and CEL-Focused Inventories to Transform Curriculum at the University of Toronto”, Sustainability, 11(2), 530.

Coleman, S., Touchie, M, Robinson, J., and Peters, T. (2018), “Rethinking Performance Gaps: a regenerative sustainability approach to built environment performance assessment”, Sustainability, 10(12), 4829.