What happens when you trade your desk at the research institute for a spot on a forest conservation team? Timo Damm, PhD candidate at the Complexity Science Hub, went to the north of Sweden to find out. In the interview, he talks about his internship experience and how it informs his research about how social movements adapt in changing world.
Hi Timo! First, please tell us a bit about yourself and what you are working on at the CSH.
I have been a PhD candidate in the Complexity Science Hub’s Digital Innovation School since October 2024. As part of the Collective Minds group, I study collective adaptation: why can some groups successfully adapt to changing problems and others can’t? What makes collective adaptation in response to changing environments – think climate change, for example – so hard, and how do our beliefs change in this process?
More specifically, I’m studying social movement organizations in this context. A social movement is defined as a group of individuals with a shared goal that aims at challenging the status quo. What makes such collectives special is that they are often more fluid and experimental in the way they organize themselves than, say, governments, and they often offer different solutions. Characteristically, they have less formal power structures: a lot of things are negotiated, few things are assumed and established from the beginning.
As part of the “Digital Innovation School” doctoral program, PhD candidates are expected to complete research exchanges outside of academia. You decided to spend your first internship with Greenpeace Sweden. How did this come about?
Outside my work life, I’ve already been engaged in forest-related activism for a couple of years. At one point, I got in touch with forest protection and indigenous rights groups from Northern Sweden, and this is where the contact came from.
What were your tasks as an intern there?
I did hands-on work with the forest team in Sweden, which gave me a deeper understanding of the structures and processes in a large collective. My tasks included organizing actions, such as handing out leaflets at a shareholder meeting, helping develop media standpoints and a campaign strategy, and creating maps.
A big part of my work was contributing to the development of Greenpeace’s forest campaign strategy. The forest team wanted to re-evaluate their strategy from the past five years and plan ahead for the next five, and they were interested in my background in social movements to help with that process. Many people on the team have deep institutional knowledge, some with 30 years at Greenpeace, so what I could offer was a structured framework to place ideas in, and put them into perspective, based on my insights studying other climate movements.
The Complexity Science Hub is looking for students who want to use their exceptional knowledge and skills to make a meaningful difference in society – whether supporting the green transition, combating crime and misinformation, improving healthcare outcomes, or building more equitable economies.
The 2026 call opens on 1 August. Find all information here.
The Graduate Program in Complexity Science is an initiative of the Digital Innovation School (DIS).
Through your internship, what did you learn about climate movements?
Previously, I did fieldwork with a much smaller climate activist group ‒ essentially a group of friends operating informally. My stay with Greenpeace expanded my view to way larger organizations, because Greenpeace is, in fact, a huge operation: They have 125 employees in Sweden alone, not counting volunteers. As a large non-profit NGO, they are bound to all the legal and organizational requirements that come with it ‒ for example, clear decision-making levels and hierarchical accountability structures, to have clear responsibilities in the case of lawsuits, for example.
What I learned is that the only things such a huge operation as Greenpeace has in common with small climate and environmental activist groups are the causes they campaign for. Structurally, they are extremely different. I found that these differences can create tension for people moving from small activist collectives, where all decisions are made together. On the other hand, Greenpeace’s scale also gives it resources smaller movements don’t have. For example, Greenpeace maintained a almost 200-day presence in a Sámi village near the Finnish border, supporting the Sámi community’s opposition to logging on their land by a government-owned forestry company. Such a campaign is only possible because of the organization’s resources.
How will your experience inform your further research?
I will continue to do research directly together with Greenpeace. My short time with them gave me valuable insights and experience but did not allow for data collection and analysis. I plan to study the content and success of their campaigns and aim to develop structured insights into how external stress, such as through lawsuits, affects the organization’s size, its culture, and the way individuals interact within it. In other words, I want to understand how Greenpeace’s employees cope with a changing environment and what we can learn from this about collective adaptation in general.
What do you think are the benefits of trading your desk at the institute for something completely different for a couple of months?
You can see it as a sort of reality check. I got to talk a lot about practitioners with decade-long experience as well as with people who just got into environmental activism and have a fresh perspective. In some of these discussions, my research got challenged and scrutinized. I think your research and its capacity to change the world for the better can benefit from that.
In June 2026, Timo spoke at a webinar at the Harvard Kennedy School, a public policy and administration graduate school at Harvard University. Hosted by the Allan Lab for Democracy Renovation at the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation, one of the sessions focused on what makes social initiatives successful. Drawing from his experience when he lived in the Netherlands, Timo presented the example of a Dutch community-led snack bar that served as the nucleation point of several local initiatives, e.g. targeting a local housing crisis.
