Marjan Minnesma

Marjan Minnesma studied business administration, philosophy, and (international) law. She has been campaign director for Greenpeace Netherlands and worked for ten years in academia (VU and Erasmus University). Together with co-director and professor Rotmans at the Institute for Transitions (DRIFT), she founded Urgenda, an organization for innovation and sustainability, to make the required transitions happen. Urgenda worked as a front runner on solutions, from organizing the first collective buying initiative for solar panels to the introduction in the Netherlands of the first electric car produced in series. In order to further speed up transition processes, she brought the government to court together with almost 900 citizens to demand more action and won twice.

Marjan has been named the most influential person working in the field of sustainability in the Netherlands several years in a row. In 2015 she was declared to be a ‘leading global thinker’ by the authoritative American magazine Foreign Policy. She is the chair of om|nieuwe energie, the umbrella organisation of 40 local sustainable energy cooperatives.