Esmee Wilcox
Visiting Senior Fellow in Social Equity and Sustainability
- research@uos.ac.uk
- School/Directorate
- Research Directorate
Esmee Wilcox is a Visiting Senior Fellow in the Suffolk Sustainability Institute. Esmee works in the spaces in-between citizen-led groups, NGOs and UK local and national government on sustainability futures. She is a social systems change and futures practitioner, working through consultancy Socially Adept; and PhD researcher in the Science, Society and Sustainability group at UEA. Esmee is known for her ability to co-create conditions for transformative action, working with diverse groups in seemingly stable systems.
Esmee’s first careers in policy and political engagement spanned several central government bodies, where she also undertook her Masters in Professional Development (Middlesex) on dialogue for transformative learning in the evidence-policy interface whilst at Defra and the Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit in the mid-2000s. She worked in one of the government’s science laboratories implementing new commercial strategies, before stints in local government in the 2010s on cross-sector partnerships and policy in healthcare reforms. She set up her consultancy in 2017 to develop leading-edge practice.
Esmee was published on a series of 12 social change questions out to 2050 by the Association of Professional Futurists, as one of 8 global ‘Emerging Fellows’ collaborating in 2019, and teaches futures, systems change, and social research skills as a guest lecturer and in her professional practice. She is delighted to be part of the Suffolk Sustainability Institute as the University grows its globally relevant research for local and civic impact.
‘How might feminists transform futures for the production and use of evidence in policy-making?’ Journal of Futures Studies Symposium, (March 2025)
LINK: https://jfsdigital.org/2025/03/07/how-might-feminists-transform-futures-for-the-production-and-use-of-evidence-in-public-policy-making/
‘Social Change in our coming decade of exploration’ essay commissioned for The Henley Forum’s 20th anniversary, Henley Business School (2022)
LINK: https://assets.henley.ac.uk/v3/fileUploads/12-Esmee-Wilcox-2022.pdf
‘Are Social Entrepreneurs the Capitalists of the Future?’ (2020) chapter in Aguilar- Milan S. (eds.) ‘Capital Transformed’ (Designed by Accident, 2020). (Publication of the 2019 Association of Professional Futurists Emerging Fellowship Programme.)
LINK: https://www.abebooks.co.uk/9798630640123/Capital-Transformed-Aguilar-Millan-Stephen-Charlotte/plp
‘Lessons from an unpredictable future’ in Pioneers Post (March 2018)
LINK: https://www.pioneerspost.com/business-school/20180307/lessons-unpredictable-future
Various blogs for the Centre for Social Innovation, Cambridge Judge Business School (2014-16)
LINK: https://socialinnovation.blog.jbs.cam.ac.uk/2016/06/14/attending-to-behaviour-in-organisations-the-antidote-to-weariness/
‘The Failure Files’ Chapter on Government (Triarchy Press, 2011) writing on innovation, risk and intelligent failure in the UK civil service and local government, part of an RSA project.
LINK: https://www.triarchypress.net/the-failure-files.html
Speaker on “Co-creating across organisational boundaries in healthcare reform”; at “The Collaborative Coast” joint Universities of Kent, East Anglia and Essex conference (2022)
Speaker on “Co-production and Storytelling” in the University of Suffolk Storytelling Conference (2018)
Member Association of Professional Futurists (2019)
Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA) (2006).