Stephen Mejia-Carranza’s research focuses on investigating the concept of ‘attractors’ and the role they play in enabling or inhibiting transformations towards sustainability and justice from a complex adaptive system perspective.

Mejia-Carranza is a PhD candidate at Stockholm Resilience Centre. As part of the TransMod project he works to investigate processes that enable or prevent transformative change within existing socio-political, historical and ecological contexts. Mejia-Carranza’s research focuses on exploring the concept of ‘attractors’ and investigating the role they play in transformations towards sustainability and justice in the South Africa food system from a complex adaptive system perspective. He is particularly interested in participatory methods of research and knowledge co-production that generate insights of how existing social inequalities and historical legacies intersect with worsening ecological crises, and identify pathways that enable transformative change.

Mejia-Carranza holds an MSc degree in Social-Ecological Resilience for Sustainable Development from Stockholm Resilience Centre. His thesis focused on developing a conceptual definition and building a tentative framework for analyzing ‘transformative potential’ in social-ecological systems shaped by social inequalities.

Previously, Mejia-Carranza worked as Associate Director of Policy and Advocacy at Friends of the Los Angeles River, a non-profit based in Los Angeles, where he led the organizations’ major policy initiatives and advocacy campaigns to transform river governance and urban water management in Southern California. Mejia-Carranza has worked across a range of water-related issues including low-impact stormwater development (LID), integrated regional water management (IRWMP), flood risk management, and baseline environmental flows. In this work he has collaborated with a diversity of local, non-profit, governmental and private sector partners across a range of initiatives including community park projects and regional-scale watershed planning efforts.

Mejia-Carranza is a member of the Water Solutions Network – a cross-sector collaboration of leaders committed to sustainable and equitable land and water stewardship in California.

Supervision

Michele-Lee Moore
Maja Schlüter