Amanda Jiménez Aceituno’s research focuses on sustainability transformations in socio-ecological systems, including transdisciplinary research and methods that engage with Indigenous and local knowledge.

Jiménez-Aceituno is currently working on three research projects. In Powering Change with Justice, she continues engaging with Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities’ perspectives on transformations, including their unique pathways toward sustainable and just futures that build on their own values and worldviews. Specifically, she seeks to understand the impacts of wind energy in Sami territories, as well as their visions for more sustainable and just futures.

In Stormy Waters, Jiménez-Aceituno focuses on implementing transdisciplinary processes, including systems-thinking approaches such as Causal Loop Diagrams, participatory network analysis, and Joint Fact Finding, to help disentangle the conflict between seal and cormorant conservation and fisheries in Sweden. This project is a collaboration with colleagues at SLU and SU DEEP and also seeks to understand the effects of conflicts on ecosystems.

Finally, Jiménez-Aceituno is leading the Stockholm Resilience Centre team within the Horizon Europe project RISTANC (Research and Innovation cooperation for SusTAinability and reaching EU missioNs objeCtives). Within this project, she seeks to contribute to studying transdisciplinary spaces, with a specific focus on understanding and improving how we train new generations of transdisciplinary scholars.

Her previous projects have included XPaths, an international project with case studies in Brazil, Senegal, and Spain, in which she has coordinated the latter one. Within it, she conducted 13 workshops with multiple Spanish stakeholders (e.g., farmers, managers, NGOs, or governmental actors) to develop a shared understanding of the social-ecological agrarian system of southeast Spain, identify leverage points to move the system toward sustainability, and co-create action plans. Jiménez-Aceituno was also a core member of the development of the Resilience Science Must-Knows. This was a collaboration between Stockholm Resilience Centre, the Global Resilience Partnership, and Future Earth, and generated a list of nine resilience must-knows that can be applied by decision-makers in different sectors. The report was launched at the 2025 UNFCCC COP30 in Brazil.

Jiménez-Aceituno holds a PhD and a Master of Advanced Studies in Environmental Education from the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (UAM, Spain). She also obtained a Bachelor’s degree in Environmental Sciences from this same university. She has a Postgraduate Certificate of Education (Biology and Geology Specialisation) from the Universidad Complutense de Madrid (Spain). In 2017, she joined Stockholm Resilience Centre to work as a postdoctoral fellow on Sustainable Transformations with Garry Peterson, Albert Norström, and Per Olsson under the Seeds of Good Anthropocenes project. In 2021, she was the managing director of the Institute for Sustainable Development and Learning at Leuphana University Lüneburg, where she also worked as a researcher until 2023, and she is currently a guest researcher at the Social-Ecological Systems Institute (SESI).

She has worked on biodiversity conservation and ecosystem services in Costa Rica, Colombia, and Spain, on transformations linked to Indigenous and Local Knowledge in Colombia and Sweden (Sápmi), and on the implementation of transdisciplinary methodologies in Sweden and Spain. She is also actively involved in MSc and PhD supervision, coordinating the SRC MSc course titled “Ecosystem support of humanity” since 2020.

Jiménez-Aceituno is a member of the Society for Social-Ecological Systems (SocSES) and the thematic stream of “Seeds and plural pathways to transformative change”, and since 2020, leader of the SRC Transformative Futures theme.