Modeled after the long-running UVA in Argentina program, UVA in Sweden places interdisciplinary student teams with Swedish client organisations to work on real sustainability consulting projects. Sitting at the intersection of systems engineering, environmental management, and business, students are tasked with identifying system goals, formulating requirements and performance metrics, generating and evaluating alternative solutions, and presenting recommendations to their clients. A central aim of the program is the development of intercultural competence, gained not in the abstract, but through the everyday work of navigating Swedish organisational contexts, stakeholders, and ways of working.
This year's cohort brings together students from a notably broad mix of disciplines, including Systems Engineering, Global Sustainability, Economics and Philosophy, Data Science, Applied Mathematics, and Finance, a composition that mirrors the kind of cross-disciplinary collaboration the projects themselves demand.
This year's client projects
The 2026 edition features four projects with three Swedish partner organisations, spanning energy policy, urban sharing systems, and the cultural sector.
Energikontor Syd — Energy Poverty in Sweden: Policy analysis and local recommendations for regional and municipal actors
Students are analysing how energy poverty manifests in the Swedish context, mapping existing policy instruments and local initiatives, and developing policy-relevant recommendations for Energikontor Syd and similar regional and municipal actors. Teams may scope their analysis to one of three energy-use domains: heating, electricity, or transport.
Sege Park — Sege Park Energy & Sharing Systems
This project examines how different sharing economy models, from shared mobility, tools, and space to energy community arrangements such as collective ownership, peer-to-peer energy exchange, and local energy markets, can deliver both direct community benefits and environmental gains. Students are working to identify which models best align with community needs, desires, and hobbies, and to assess viable, scalable business and organisational structures for their implementation within Sege Park's specific stakeholder, infrastructure, and governance context.
Cirkus Syd — Festival Hospitality and Artist Mobility: A High Wire Act
Rather than focusing on the emissions of individual artist trips, this project looks at the organisational and relational models that shape how artists travel, stay, and work in a festival context. The goal: structurally making artist participation more convenient, lower cost, and less environmentally impactful.
Cirkus Syd — The Festival as Cultural Commons — A Lot to Juggle
This project explores how sharing-based arrangements, equipment and scenography pools, co-programming and co-production between venues, shared workshop and rehearsal infrastructure, and open or participatory programme formats, can be combined into viable organisational configurations for Cirkus Syd and its partners. It also asks what kinds of cultural participation such arrangements enable or foreclose. In short: reducing the costs and environmental footprint of the individual organisations central to the Southern Sweden Circus Festival, while making the festival more accessible through a cultural commons framing.
Lectures and exchange at the Institute
Alongside their client work, students are taking part in a lecture series given by IIIEE researchers, designed to deepen the conceptual grounding of their consulting projects:
- Urban energy transitions — Anna-Riikka Kojonsaari
- Sustainable Business Modelling from a Systems and Design Thinking Perspective — Georgios Pardalis
- Citizens' participation and collaborative action — Gustav Osberg
The exchange goes both ways. Among the visiting UVA faculty is Zackary Landsman, whose work at JunkLabz (https://www.junklabz.com/), a venture focused on closing the loop on otherwise single-use plastics, offers students and IIIEE researchers alike a window into entrepreneurial approaches to material circularity.
A continued partnership
The annual visit has become a valued fixture in the IIIEE calendar. The combination of motivated, interdisciplinary students, ambitious Swedish client organisations, and the cross-cultural exchange between Charlottesville and Lund makes each edition distinct, and consistently generates work that is genuinely useful to the partner organisations.
We look forward to seeing the recommendations the teams deliver in the coming weeks, and we thank UVA, Energikontor Syd, Sege Park, and Cirkus Syd for making the 11th edition possible.
