Dr. Shirin Betzler

Project Manager

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Shirin joined the Sustainable Infrastructure, Products and Services Team in 2025.

With a background in intercultural and organizational psychology, she has a strong interest in how culture influences the way individuals think, collaborate, and organize their surroundings at global, organizational, or community levels. She views the sustainability transition as a profound process of culture change and brings this perspective into her work on sustainable production and consumption, capacity building, and multi-stakeholder engagement.

Shirin’s professional journey combines research, policy, and practice, engaging diverse stakeholders from academia, public administration, civil society, and businesses. For the last 10+ years, she has contributed to various scientific, practice-oriented, and international cooperation and capacity-building projects, ranging from producer-consumer-networks in Ghana and Costa Rica to trust dynamics for sustainable food policy acceptance in Chile. Her doctoral research focused on fostering change in sustainble consumption behavior through evidence-based interventions in capacity-building and policymaking. Driven by a strong desire to translate academic insights into practice, she has continuously collaborated with public and private sector actors, for example on tackling barriers to implement circularity in the German manufacturing sector, accompanying organizational change in municipalities or leveraging the power of small entrepreneurs for sustainable community development through digital platforms.

Shirin is experienced in project planning and evidence-based management through monitoring and evaluation. Her strong methodological expertise in quantitative and qualitative research methods as well as participatory workshop formats constitute the basis to involve diverse stakeholder groups in transformation processes. With numerous publications, capacity-building and teaching assignments, she is committed to knowledge transfer and learning. In addition, she is a certified intercultural trainer and has gained experience in the implementation of national policy measures in the field of Education for Sustainable Development and Global Learning.

Shirin is a German national.