Our Team

Dr. Beling is the Canada Research Chair in Transition to Sustainability at The King’s University and Assistant Professor of Sociology and Environmental Studies. Dr. Beling’s theoretical and empirical work 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”). He 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.

Dr. Beling holds a PhD in Sociology from the Humboldt University of Berlin and from the Alberto Hurtado University, in Chile, as well as an M.A. in Global Studies. Trained in Economics, Business Administration, and Social Sciences in Argentina (National University of Cuyo and FLACSO), Germany (University of Freiburg), and India (Jawaharlal Nehru University), he is a lecturer and public speaker in diverse academic and non-academic contexts in different countries.

Moreover, Dr. Beling has a track record of academic entrepreneurship: In 2014 he co-founded the academic blog and journal Alternautas, hosted by the library of the University of Warwick and devoted to making Latin-American socio-environmental thinking available to a non-Spanish speaking audience. Dr. Beling is also co-founder and board member of Ecocene Foundation, a center of advanced studies and platform of change devoted to promoting the transition to sustainability. 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.