Heyyo!
What follows is not an absolutely neutral account (which I would like it to be, and to which I tried to get as close as I can, following the idea of Counteracting the fallacy of grey). This is my best attempt to be honest about a programme that I study and that I think deserves more rigorous scrutiny than you can currently find on the web.
One thing to say plainly before any of the analysis: if LUMES costs you nothing — if you're an EU student, or you have a scholarship — you can stop here and just go. It's a great! programme; on balance it's clearly better than the average master's in sustainability. At low or no financial stake, the downside risks are rather small. Read the rest if you're paying substantial tuition, or if you are unsure, or if you're the kind of person who wants to arrive already seeing the trade-offs.
But »great!« is exactly what made me write this guide. LUMES sits inside one of the world's most functional societies, at a university that is the most sustainable on Earth (in 2026), with abundant resources and reputation. Against that backdrop, great is not the ceiling — it's the floor. The gap between what the programme is and what it could be with those advantages fully used is large, and, so far, mostly unclosed. Everything that follows is an argument about that gap, not a case against the programme.
This is part of my review on the LUMES. Here you'll find general descriptions of what is wrong?, or at least questionable, with it. I'll publish new parts every week from now on, consistently, I hope!
I care deeply about making this piece as representative of the programme as possible. Before publishing this, I've got as much feedback from as many of my peers as I could. My exceptional thanks to everybody who at some point contributed to this text: Mel, Frederik, Oscar, Jonas, Ana, Ipsita,
Originally, I was very unsure if my vision of LUMES issues is realistic — would somebody from outside flag the same patterns? Would this help you to make a good decision about where to study? — and that was why I wrote a separate paragraph on what I can be biased on (you can still see it below). But then, when I was already preparing to publish — I found it, an independent review of the program by a collective of professors from 2021 buried deep in the faculty documentation archives. I'll just show what I said to my friend that day (though it's a bit emotional and exaggerated):
LOOK AT THIS
It is bloody similar to what I've written, with one hell huge note: this assessment is 5 years old, and — hell — NOTHING changed
So I'm way more comfortable about my/our conclusions in this guide: they are very similar to an external review. You can download it here (+ response here) or find it by the name: Programme evaluation of Master of Science Programme in Environmental Studies and Sustainability Science (LUMES): Statement from external expert group; Development plan for the Master's programme in Environmental Studies and Sustainability Science (LUMES). In every section below, I've added some quotes from this review and response, but you are very welcome to check the original if you ever feel sceptical!
Hope it will be easy to navigate!
My name is Vlady! Hello there!
I've just finished my first year of the Master's in Environmental Studies and Sustainability Science (LUMES) at Lund University Centre for Sustainability Studies (LUCSUS). I am Ukrainian, from the Donbas (East Ukraine). As a non-EU student, I could afford LUMES — acceptance rate around 2-3% — only with the Swedish Institute Scholarship for Global Professionals, itself a 3-4% acceptance rate (many thanks Swedish taxpayers). I currently serve as student representative for LUMES'29, health and safety representative for LUCSUS, and project assistant within the centre, while volunteering and sitting on the board of several student organisations, namely Effective Altruism Lund.
My background and access sharpen certain observations. Coming from a non-EU country, I am acutely sensitive to the financial realities of LUMES and the cost-efficiency of the program. My background (environmental science, deeper organic chemistry with a blend of GIS/geology) means I notice when natural science content goes shallow or stays at the surface. And arriving with high personal ambition (and a trade-offy habit of overloading myself), I reflect on the programme's pace as a structural feature — not just a personal frustration — in a way that a more relaxed student might not.
It also limits what I see. My social science background is thin, so I likely underestimate gaps there that a political science or economics graduate would catch immediately. I place epistemic rigour at the top of what I judge a programme by — which means I probably underweight things that matter genuinely to other students: the physical environment, resource access, general comfort of study conditions. If you come with a different hierarchy of priorities, you probably are not wrong to weigh those things differently than I do (just be honest about why you prioritise what). And then there is everything I cannot name here, because I don't know it — the blind spots that are blind precisely because I can't see them.
Read what follows with that in mind. Where your background differs significantly from mine, please adjust accordingly.
Before evaluating what LUMES delivers, it is worth establishing what it formally promises. The following comes directly from the programme description. The rest of this guide will test how well the programme meets them.
A substantial list! Its breadth is both the programme's main selling point and the source of its main tensions. Three of these competency promises will come up repeatedly in what follows: the ability to critically assess fundamental assumptions, the ability to work at a strategic level, and the breadth of disciplinary exposure implied by the knowledge outcomes. I focus on these not because the others are unimportant, but because they are where the gap between promise and delivery is most visible — at least from where I sit.
LUCSUS occupies its own floor, its own building, its own social world. You'll have instant community, personalised attention from a small and stable circle of profs., and a strong sense of belonging almost from day one. What you won't have, by default, is contact with other ways of thinking — other departments, other disciplines, other worldviews. Roughly 90% of the people who teach you belong to the same intellectual tradition. This will limit your epistemic views and increase the chance of you missing out on new ideas and concepts. Broadening your views beyond is possible, but it takes deliberate effort against a strong current.
Critical Sustainability Science is genuinely (and rightfully) critical — of capitalism, of neoliberalism, of extractive development. What it rarely turns that same lens on is itself. Degrowth and Marxist frameworks are taught as serious alternatives but seldom subjected to their most serious challenges. Simply said, this looks like double standards: harsh on opponents, soft on self. The same asymmetry shows up in argumentation itself: sloppy reasoning against capitalism gets a pass that sloppy reasoning defending it never would — imprecise terms, appeals to self-evidence, results dismissed with laughter instead of scrutiny. You'll leave equipped to attack positions outside sustainability science and largely unprepared to defend, or even stress-test, the ones taught inside it.
LUMES promises to train strategic thinkers who can assess which sustainability problems most deserve attention and does the first step: you will almost always have freedom to select topics for your assignments (which is wonderful!). But the program never equips you with tools for selection. In practice, almost every assignment hands you the pleasant but slippery principle — *follow your compassion. Fix your policy of interest, follow the resource intriguing you — and then ask you to justify it, not to weigh it against alternatives. Justifying a choice you've already made is not the same skill as identifying the best choice among many. That second skill is never taught. Besides, the assignments also tend to assume a resource-rich, Sweden-like context — budgets exist, institutions function, stakeholders show up — which isn't the operating reality most of the world's sustainability problems get solved in (and which you probably will have to face).
LUMES admits students with strong backgrounds in one field and asks them to build competence across many. The trade-off shows up early: most courses spend one to two weeks of every month on foundational material, which some students already know and others desperately need. Either way, the time that you could use to go toward advanced tools and methods goes toward catching everyone up to the same starting line instead. Besides, there is structural disbalance between natural and social — second will get way more time and attention.
Read the programme description and natural and social sciences look like equal partners — the learning outcomes even name the natural side first. They aren't. LUMES (Lund University Masters in Environmental Studies) is, in practice, a social-science degree: the social-science courses run deeper, take more of the teaching time, and the interdisciplinary integration flows almost entirely one way — natural-science courses absorb social-science concepts, but rarely the reverse. If you come from the natural sciences, this is largely a gift — you'll leave genuinely fluent in a way of reasoning you didn't arrive with. The catch is that nobody tells you it's coming; the materials imply a balance the programme doesn't deliver. The humanities, meanwhile, barely feature at all.
LUMES runs on collaboration — every course, every month, small groups producing shared work. If you come from an academic culture where individual work is the default (most of us do), this can feel quite overwhelming at first. It's also, quietly, a social expectation as much as an academic one, which can be genuinely taxing if constant collaboration isn't your preferred mode of work. What it teaches you, though, is something books and lectures can't: how to move work forward with people who don't automatically agree with you on how to do things.
Sustainability is one of the broadest fields existing — which means someone has to keep deciding where its edges are, as those edges move. LUMES made that decision years ago and mostly hasn't revisited it. You'll be taught the field's settled core — nature, society, then coupled socio-ecological systems — and taught it rather well. What you won't encounter is the moving frontier: the sustainability of democratic institutions and of conflict, the philosophy of obligation to the far future, the prevention of irreversible catastrophe rather than only the building of good things. (I'll be honest that my Effective Altruism background makes me weight those last ones heavily — a different reader would pick different frontier topics, which is exactly the point: the programme never runs the argument about its own edges at all.) The 2021 review already worried, in its own terms, about LUMES keeping pace with a fast-moving field. Five years on, the map looks much the same.
Some of what you gain here has nothing to do with LUMES specifically. Sweden consistently ranks among the world's most stable, well-functioning societies, and Lund is a city built almost entirely around its university — dense with student community, organisations, and academic life you can plug into freely. Career infrastructure is weaker than you'd expect, particularly if you don't speak Swedish, but the ambient value of two years inside this environment is real and worth weighing on its own terms.
I'm finishing year one, so this section is structural description, not lived experience — and it's the one most likely to grow once I have that experience to draw on:) What I can tell you now: proposal cycles begin early in year two, supervisors are assigned around November, and formal supervision doesn't start until the fourth and final semester, which is dedicated entirely to the thesis. That's a tighter runway than many bachelor's programmes offer, and worth understanding before you assume you'll have time to figure out your topic once you arrive.
There is much I cannot tell you. I do not know how responsive supervisors are in practice, how much the quality of supervision varies, how the proposal review process actually works from the inside, or how students experience the pressure of a single-semester thesis sprint. These are the questions that matter most for assessing the second year, and they are precisely the ones I am not yet positioned to answer (yet, this part is to be filed in a year).
If the thesis is a significant part of why you are considering LUMES — if you have a research question you want to pursue, or if the quality of supervision matters greatly to you — I would strongly recommend talking directly to current second-year students and recent graduates before you apply. Ask them specifically: how much time did you have to develop your question? How available was your supervisor? Would you do it differently? Those conversations will tell you more than this section can.
A guide like this one risks leaving you with a clearer picture of what is wrong with LUMES than of whether LUMES is right for you. Those are different questions. What follows is an attempt to answer the second one — not as a verdict, but as a decision tool. The programme has real strengths and real limitations. Which of those matters more depends entirely on who you are and what you are trying to do.
Before the fit questions, the honest credit. LUMES delivers a genuine interdisciplinary community — students from many countries with backgrounds spanning the full range of disciplines that sustainability science draws on, and a shared intellectual project that most programmes don't attempt. None of this is only my ‘sugaring’ — the 2021 external review was, on balance, genuinely positive. As I already said above, the critique is about the gap between good and what it promises to be, its full potential.
The teaching relationships are real: with a small centre and a stable faculty, you are known, you receive personalised feedback, and you have access to researchers in a way that students in large departments often don't. The critical sustainability science tradition LUCSUS works in is coherent, internally rigorous, and worth knowing deeply — even if, as I have argued, it needs more pressure-testing than the programme currently provides. Staff attentiveness to student wellbeing, in the majority of cases I observed or heard about, was genuine — deadline adjustments when students were visibly struggling, and real support during difficult personal situations (be open to asking for help if you need it!), which matter more than usual when/if you're living abroad for the first time. The Knowledge to Action course is genuinely useful. Being in Lund and Sweden gives you two years inside a well-functioning institutional environment and a dense student community. These are not small things.
Pace. LUMES moves slowly by the standards of demanding master's programmes. Lectures and seminars will not fill your intellectual bandwidth. It’s only 4-5 weeks (the first week is intro, the last one is usually free coursework); you end up having up to 10 different lecturers within one course, usually only 90 min of lectures per day. If you are the kind of person who needs to be pushed by external structure to produce your best work, you may find the programme frustrating — not because it demands too much, but because it demands too little. If, on the other hand, you have clear projects, interests, or ambitions outside the classroom — a language to learn, organisations to run or engage with, research to develop independently, a career to build — the slow pace is a resource. The programme leaves you time. What you do with it is yours to decide.
One last thing. This guide was written by one person, in one year, from one position (even though I try to summarise and incorporate thoughts I see repeated as a student rep). It reflects what I could see from where I stood — which is not everything, and not always the most important things. LUMES has graduated over a thousand students from a hundred countries since 1997. Many of them found it transformative. Some found it disappointing. Most I've talked to found it somewhere in between — useful for some things, limited for others, worth it on balance or not depending on what they brought and what they needed. That range is the honest picture. The review is part of why I trust that range. An outside expert group looked at the same programme and came away impressed; I looked and came away with these reservations; both readings are real, and they're not actually in conflict — they're two altitudes on the same honest picture.
What I hope this guide has done is give you enough of the real texture of the programme — its design logic, its trade-offs, its strengths and gaps — that you can place yourself in that range with some accuracy before you arrive, rather than after. The decision is yours. Make it with open eyes.
There are several past motivations which pushed me to write this:
There are also several future hopes, which led me to write this:
Hope this helps!
And maybe see you in Lund!
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