Christine Wamsler, Professor of Sustainability Science at Lund University Centre for Sustainability Studies (LUCSUS), is a globally recognised expert on sustainable development, climate action, and transformative change. With more than 25 years of experience bridging research and practice, she has become a leading voice in advancing new approaches to address today's complex global challenges.
Each year, Professor Wamsler visits “Living the Sustainability Idea” a voluntary track open to students in the MSc in International Strategic Management and the MSc in Management programmes at LUSEM. For the 2025/2026 academic year, 25 students have enrolled.
This year, Professor Wamsler offered the group an in-depth introduction to the updated Inner Development Guide (IDG), a guide designed to support the inner skills and capacities needed for sustainable societal transformation. She highlighted that we are currently living in a polycrisis, with many crises that are collaborated, rooted in fundamental separation from self, others, and nature.
Inner growth is essential for outer change. The world will not change if we don’t.
The Inner Development Guide, formerly known as the Inner Development Goals Framework, has recently been updated. It serves as an open-source resource showcasing skills, qualities, and capacities that can help individuals and organisations foster more meaningful, cooperative, and regenerative ways of living and working.
Professor Wamsler challenged students to critically reflect on modern values such as competition, financial success, and individual achievement — norms that often drive today’s systems but can stand in the way of addressing the polycrisis. Transforming society, she argued, requires shifting these underlying values.
Despite the scale of change needed, she offered an optimistic perspective: transformation does not require everyone to shift at once.
"We only need around 15% of people to change a behavior for society to follow,” she noted, pointing to historical examples of rapid social change within just one or two generations.
Over the coming academic year, participating students will work actively with the Inner Development Guide to explore and strengthen their inner capacities. Through reflection, practice, and group dialogue, they will learn how personal development can serve as a foundation for organisational and global change.
