Dr. Adrian Beling

Education

PhD, Humboldt University of Berlin (Germany) and Alberto Hurtado University (Chile) (co-tutelle), 2017
M.A. Freiburg University (Germany) and FLACSO Argentina (joint degree), 2011
B.A. Universidad Nacional de Cuyo (Argentina), 2003

Biography

Dr. Adrian E. Beling is the Canada Research Chair in Transition to Sustainability and Assistant Professor of Sociology and Environmental Studies. Dr. Beling came to King’s in 2022 after a twelve-years journey that brought him from his birthplace in Argentina, where he did his undergraduate studies and worked for a number of years in the wine industry (after having established that orchestra conducting and priesthood were not part of his vocation, after all) through Europe and South-Asia, were he did his master studies, and back to South-America, where he started a PhD in Sociology at the Jesuit Alberto Hurtado University in Chile in co-tutelle with Humboldt University in Berlin, where he moved together with his wife Cristina in October 2013.

At King’s, Dr. Beling’s main job is research, where he leads a research group of King’s students and international grad student assistants, and teaches two courses, as well as block seminars at the graduate level at other universities. When not travelling or sitting at his work desk (or, alternatively, in cafes, where the background chatter serves as a mantra for concentrating, especially when writing), Dr. Beling enjoys reading, hiking, watching movies and series, as well as spending time discussing passionately with friends and colleagues about the state of the world.

Research

The ecological state of the world, comprising both social and environmental dimensions, is unprecedented in human history in terms of system-wide destabilization, which demands fundamental reconfigurations in current patterns of societal organization worldwide. In his theoretical and empirical work, Dr. Beling explores both the conditions for a successful sustainability transition (“transition governance”) and how governance itself is transformed as a result of sustainability imperatives (“governance in transition”).

Dr. Beling has published extensively on the Latin-American Buen vivir experiment, while his latest work focuses on the role of religion & church as a sustainability governance agent, and on the interface of politics and culture in sustainability governance theory. This research agenda is pursued jointly with partner universities and projects through the SustENABLE Transformation program.

Visit the website of my current research project on the church as a sustainability transition agent.

Courses

Humanity and the Biosphere (ENVS300 / GEOG300)
Global Sustainability (SSCI399B, SOCI399B, POLI399B, ENVS399B)

Selected publications

• Beling, Adrian (in press). The Catholic Church in Times of Ecological Crisis: An “Unusual Suspect” in Advancing the Transition to Sustainability?, Religion & Development, Humboldt-University, Berlin. Special issue “Care for the Poor, Care for the Earth:
• Catholic-Muslim Dialogues on Development”, guest eds. Séverine Deneulin and Masooda Bano
• Beling, Adrian E. (2023). Dictionary entry: Human development. Dictionary of Ecological Economics, Edward Elgar Publishing.
• Beling, A. E., Cubillo-Guevara, A.P, Vanhulst, J., Hidalgo-Capitán, A.L. (2021). Buen vivir (good living): Glocal genealogy of a Latin-American utopia. Latin American Perspectives. Volume 48, Issue 3, pp. 17-34
• Vanhulst, J., & Beling, A. E. (2019). “Post-Eurocentric Sutainability Governance. Lessons from the Latin-American Buen vivir experiment”, en A. Kalfagiani, D. Fuchs & A Hayden (eds). Routledge Handbook of Global Sustainability Governance, London, Routledge, ISBN 978-1-138-04828-7.
• Beling, Adrián & Vanhulst, Julien (Eds.) (2019), Desarrollo non Sancto. La religión como actor emergente en el debate global sobre el futuro del planeta. Siglo XXI, México D.F. ISBN: 978-607-03-0995-3
• Beling, Adrian E., Julien Vanhulst, Federico Demaria, Violeta Rabi, Ana Estefanía Carballo, and Jérôme Pelenc (2018). Discursive Synergies for a ‘Great Transformation’ towards Sustainability: Pragmatic Contributions to a Necessary Dialogue between Human Development, Degrowth, and Buen Vivir. Ecological Economics 144: 304–13.
• Vanhulst, J., & Beling, A. E. (2014). Buen vivir: Emergent discourse within or beyond sustainable development? Ecological Economics, 101, 54–63.

Academic Entrepreneurship

In 2014 he co-founded the academic blog and journal Alternautas, hosted by the library of the University of Warwick (UK) and devoted to making Latin-American socio-environmental thinking available to a non-Spanish speaking audience. Beling is also co-founder and board member of Ecocene Foundation which hosts an emerging Centre of Advanced Studies and a platform of change devoted to promoting the transition to sustainability. This agenda is streamlined through the international research program SustENABLE Transformation, including an online evolving Atlas of sustainability transition initiatives.

In the field of education, in 2020, Dr. Beling designed and started the Higher Diploma in Integral Ecology, which is jointly awarded by 42 member-universities of the University Network for the Care of the Common Home (RUC), and has trained over 250 international students across the American continent. In 2021, Dr. Beling also became Academic Director of the Latin-American module of the Global Studies Programme at FLACSO Argentina (Latin-American Faculty of Social Sciences), a master’s program jointly conducted by an international consortium of universities in four continents. Dr. Beling is also a Research Fellow at the Earth System Governance Project.

Dr. Beling’s Google Scholar profile