Louis Lebel is the director of the Unit for Social and Environmental Research at the School of Public Policy at Chiang Mai University, Thailand. His interests include: social justice, global environmental change, livelihoods, public health, gender norms, development studies, adaptation, aquaculture, consumption, flood disaster politics and water governance. Lebel conducts research on the environment and development at multiple scales, from local and regional work in Southeast Asia, to a global scale. A current theoretical and empirical research focus is on the role of narratives in policy change and persistence. He helps edit the journals Global Environmental Change, WIREs Climate Change and Ecology and Society. He is a research associate of the Stockholm Environment Institute, Sweden, and an adjunct faculty at the Institute of Water Policy at the National University of Singapore. Lebel has been a founding member of the Scientific Steering Committee of the Earth System Governance Project till 2014, and since then a member of its select Lead Faculty.