Frank W. Geels is Professor of System Innovation and Sustainability at the Alliance Manchester Business School at the University of Manchester. He is a world-leading scholar on socio-technical sustainability transitions, which involve deep transformations in energy, mobility and agri-food systems. Geels’s work combines insights from innovation studies, evolutionary economics, institutional theory, and political science. He is particularly well-known for his conceptual and empirical work on the Multi-Level Perspective (MLP) and Strategic Niche Management (SNM), which help explain the emergence of radical innovations and the unfolding of socio-technical transitions. He has analysed a dozen historical transitions as well as contemporary low-carbon transitions in multiple domains and countries.
Geels published six books and 88 peer-reviewed articles including in Science, Nature Climate Change and Global Environmental Change. He was selected in Thomson Reuters’ prestigious list of ‘Highly Cited Researchers’ (in 2014, 2019, 2020 and 2021), and elected as member of the Academia Europaea and Academy of Social Sciences.
Geels was a lead author of the 2022 Sixth Assessment Report of the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), and is a member of the Scientific Committee of the European Environment Agency (EEA).
Geels has consulted and written invited reports for the European Environment Agency, OECD, European Commission, UK Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS), UK Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA), and the Dutch Department of Environmental Affairs.