What happens after we become aware of the scale of climate disruption, inequality, and ecological loss? Karen O’Brien takes that question beyond awareness in her recent essay Bothering to Wake Up. She reflects on what it means to become sufficiently “bothered” by what is happening around us that our understanding…
What might technological innovation contribute to governance when it is treated as one form of knowledge among many rather than as a replacement for local experience and judgement? In his new Cambridge Element, Pitshou Moleka explores this question through the context of complex socio-ecological systems in Africa. Transformative Governance for…
What changes when the Earth is understood not simply as the backdrop for politics, but as something actively shaping political possibilities? Frederic Hanusch, Liza B. Bauer, Clemens Finkelstein, and Claus Leggewie take up that question in their new MIT Press book, Our Planetary Condition: Foundations for a Politics with the…
Futures frameworks help researchers and policymakers think systematically about what might lie ahead. But what happens when the social, political, technological, and ecological conditions on which those frameworks were built begin changing? Vanessa Schweizer, Kristie Ebi, Bas van Ruijven, Paula Harrison, and Kasper Kok are guest editing a special issue…
What does it take for sustainability to move from strategies, policies, and research into the institutions, communities, and everyday practices where change actually happens? That is the question behind Utrecht University’s Pathways to Sustainability Festival 2026, Just Landing: Sustainability in a Fractured World, taking place on 3 November. Among the…
Thomas Bruhn and Man Fang draw on the psychological idea of the Drama Triangle and how people move between the roles of victim, persecutor, and rescuer when sustainability work becomes politically, emotionally, or institutionally difficult.
Hallie Eakin from Arizona State University recently reached out to the Transformations Community to share a new publication emerging from more than 15 years of work with communities and institutional partners in the Río Piedras Watershed in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Navigating Everything, All at Once asks a difficult practical…
On 2 October, Prime Minister Mark Carney announced Canada’s new National Council on Artificial Intelligence, which will advise the government on its AI for All strategy. A coalition of civil society organisations, researchers and community leaders points out that the Council doesn’t appear to include meaningful representation from civil society,…
As 2030 approaches, conversations around the Sustainable Development Goals are increasingly accompanied by another question: what comes next? The Network for Education and Research on Peace and Sustainability (NERPS) is making that question part of its 2027 conference in Jakarta, bringing together researchers, students, and practitioners working across peace, sustainability,…
Different communities understand problems, evidence, futures, and even transformation itself in different ways. What might systemic design look like if that plurality is treated as a starting point rather than something to resolve? That question runs through RSD15: Designing Within a Plural World, organised by the Systemic Design Association. The…
How do we evaluate change when the systems, assumptions, and conditions around us are themselves shifting? That question sits behind the REvaluation Conference 2027, taking place under the theme Scouting Paths on Shifting Maps. The conference is inviting interactive workshop proposals exploring how evaluation may need to change amid uncertainty,…
Hannah Gosnell is a Professor of Geography in the College of Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences at Oregon State University. Her research explores the human dimensions of climate change and biodiversity conservation, regenerative agriculture, human animal relations, and transformations to sustainability. For more than a decade she has studied the…