Additional Information

Dr Joanne Tippett is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Environment and Development, University of Manchester. Her research is driven by two questions, how do we imagine a sustainable future, and how can we work together effectively to achieve systemic change?

Joanne was granted a British Academy Innovation Fellowship with the UK National Commission for UNESCO in 2023, to develop innovative new ways to activate the UN Sustainable Development Goals. This fellowship is developing and testing new ways to inspire sustainability action in place-based partnerships (such as UNESCO-designated sites) with the RoundView, a science-based framework for sustainability learning, visioning and decision-making. The RoundView is one of her award-winning innovations, and was a key engagement approach in the 5-year, £3.2 million Carbon Lanscape landscape restoration project. She is an internationally-recognised expert on co-production and participatory methodologies, with research and knowledge exchange funded by the ESRC and AHRC. 

She developed the Ketso toolkit for community and stakeholder engagement ane lerning from her research, and this has been the focus of two REF Impact Case studies.

A key recent contribution used two decades of Joanne’s research to distil lessons for effective coproduction, which was developed into a guide for practitioners. This set the groundwork for research in 2022: using artificial intelligence to turn stakeholder engagement into actionable knowledge (Turing Institute) and developing a workshop planning tool. https://thinkingware.manchester.ac.uk/

She would welcome enquires from prospective postgraduate students interested in her fields of research.

Dr Joanne Tippett is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Environment and Development at the University of Manchester. Joanne began working in the field of community participation in ecological planning in 1993, working with rural communities in Southern Africa. Her ESRC funded research into participatory river basin planning led to the development of a hands-on toolkit for engagement, Ketso. Ketso is now a social business, and the kit has been used in over 80 countries and half the universities in the UK.

Joanne holds a PhD from the University of Manchester (ESRC-CASE award with the Mersey Basin Campaign) and Chartered Environmentalist Status as a Member of the Institution of Environmental Sciences. She holds a Diploma in Permaculture Design and a Masters Degree in Social Research Methods.

The heart of my research is the application of systems thinking to collaborative system change towards ecological and social sustainability: how people and organisations can effectively re-design practise, infrastructure, processes and systems to be more sustainable. My research trajectory is rooted in my ESRC funded research, which surfaced three areas of particular significance: creative community & stakeholder engagement; systems-based models & understandings of sustainability and linking-up knowledge and innovation across time, domains and levels of scale.

My Sustainable Consumption Institute funded research into systems-based models & understandings of sustainability led to the development of the RoundView Navigational Tool for Sustainability, and this is now being deployed as the key engagement tool in the Carbon Landscape Project (HLF). Current research is exploring the process of developing a spatial imaginary in the Carbon Landscape, which has been informed by the RoundView.  Recent developments have been the creation of a package of learning for schools (being used primary schools across the Carbon Landscape. This may lead to research into the pedagogical innovations represented by the kinaesthetic learning approach.

The RoundView is also inspiring new thinking about sustainability for an exhibit and new art work at Quarry Bank, with potential for a wider roll out within the National Trust, working in collaboration with the John Rylands Research Institute and colleagues in SALC to explore new ways to interpret the history of the site and the Industrial Revolution.

Work with both Ketso and RoundView has generated a large amount of data (and continues to generate more), which will be used to develop future research in the third theme, linking knowledge and innovation across time, domains and levels of scale. Ketso embodies and enacts a deep critical pedagogy, the application of which by over 500 stakeholders will enable me to ask critical questions around how to turn data from engagement into actionable knowledge, including developing digital tools for curating, synthesising and mapping the data to find useful patterns.