Relana Lutz

Research Assistant

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Relana is a Research Assistant in the CSCP’s Sustainable Lifestyles Team, working at the intersection of individual behaviour and the societal structures that shape it. She helps make sustainability tangible by connecting consumers, businesses, and industry across the value chain, and translating broad ambitions into effective everyday changes. What sets her apart is a systems perspective that links what people do day to day with the wider conditions that make sustainable behaviour change possible.

Relana contributes to German and EU projects at the intersection of stakeholder engagement, multi-country coordination, and research. She supports by bringing partners, businesses, and civil society together. She helps to plan and facilitate project meetings, keeps the progress trackers up to date, and assists with partner-led participatory and co-creation formats. She also contributes to publications and internal deliverables, drawing on behavioural insights and a social-science reading of the drivers of everyday choices.

Relana’s work centres on projects that address sustainability from consumer behaviour to circular economy, and the use of AI in industry. Thematically, she works on behaviour change, food loss and waste prevention and reduction, and circular economy. As project results increasingly feed into policy, she also supports policy-related questions, drawing on her political-science background to connect findings with policy stakeholders. Across this work, she engages SMEs, consumers, civil society, businesses, and academia through participatory, co-creation, and transdisciplinary research.

Beyond her project work, Relana brings experience from academia and civil society. In academic research, she worked at the Chair for International Relations and Foreign Policy at the University of Trier, where her focus lay on the climate-conflict nexus, the United Nations, and NATO. Her wider intellectual interests span social inequalities and critical perspectives on society. She is also actively engaged in environmental and social causes: she volunteers with the nature-conservation organisations NABU and BUND, serves as a jury member for the Young Impact Fund, and sits on the board of ANQA, a German-Syrian association for renewal, where they support the efforts of local communities in Syria who clear rubble from streets, collect waste, and help them with reforestation.

Relana holds a B.A. in Political Science and Sociology at the University of Trier and is currently studying Social Design (M.A.) at the Hochschule für Gesellschaftsgestaltung in Koblenz, focusing on system change and the transformation of economy and society.

As a keen birdwatcher, I am reminded daily that thriving ecosystems depend on the small, mindful choices we all make. If you would like to turn sustainable ideas into real, everyday change, let’s talk!