Filka Sekulova

Filka Sekulova is a social environmental scientist working at the intersection of social sciences and heterodox economics. She is a postdoctoral researcher at the IN3 institute, (Universitat Oberta de Catalunya), and part of the Urban Transformation and Global Change Laboratory. As of 2022 Filka Sekulova coordinates the research on governance within the Coolschools ENUTS project. Filka is a founding member of the academic think thank Research & Degrowth, and part of the Barcelona Lab for Urban Environmental Justice and Sustainability. Previously she was a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology (ICTA) at the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona (UAB).

Her field of research cuts with through the fields of ecological and happiness economics, urban and critical tourism studies. Filka’s primary subject of study embraces the thematic of urban greening, where she critically examines the effectiveness and equitability of nature-based solutions as purported responses to key sustainability challenge.

A second major focus of her work concerns the processes, dynamics, and factors that drive and prefigure a degrowth-inspired societal transformation in the North. In this realm she is interested in the implications of the lifestyle, politics and policies associated with degrowth, such as the introduction of a Basic Income or downscaling mass tourism, for human well-being.

Her third research area settles in the field of community-based organizing toward sustainability and the emergence and persistence of bottom-up initiatives as experimental spaces for sharing, learning, unlearning and transformation that embody the elements of a larger systemic change.  

Filka obtained her PhD on climate change economics and happiness at the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona in 2013. Her Masters studies are on Environmental and Transport Economics, completed at Vrije Universiteit, Netherlands. She holds bachelor degrees in Psychology from the Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski” and in Economics and Business degree obtained at Universiteit van Amsterdam, Netherlands.