2022 Sustainability Transformations in Practice
This issue highlights the people, ideas, and initiatives undertaken by TC members that form a global community of action-oriented researchers and reflective practitioners supporting transformations to a sustainable and regenerative future. This special issue has four sections. The first section results from a year-long project to understand the transformation community. Over 150 Sustainability graduate students interviewed 56 members of the Transformations Community, asking them:
How do you pursue transformations in practice, and what skills and capacities do you use?
What does the word ‘transformations’ mean to you?
How did you become a transformations practitioner?
What are your challenges to being an effective transformations practitioner?
A research team led by TC members David Manuel Navarrete, Raksha Balakrishna, and Bruce Goldstein analyzed transcripts from these interviews to produce the four articles in this special issue. Key findings include:
Transformations practice is rooted in three core transdisciplinary capacities: participatory
diagnosis, expertise in knowledge co-production, and collective action. Moreover, members of our community are 'metadisciplinary', often seeking to advance the transdisciplinary field by developing innovative techniques and integrative leadership practices, creative systems pedagogies, and by reflexive theorizing on their practice.For practitioners, transformations are a complex, multi-level and multi-phase process that often involves morally grounded commitments to redressing historical injustice. Transformations practice also is often grounded in personal change, which requires re-examining assumptions and core beliefs through disruptive learning experiences.
As this suggests, becoming a transformations practitioner is often the result of epiphanies and crises that result in abandoning conventional frames and beliefs and turning away from a conventional career path. A practitioner’s meaningful interactions with non-Western cultures often triggered these crises, causing practitioners to “let go” and “unlearn” what counts as valid and useful knowledge and how learning occurs.
The challenges to being an effective transformations practitioner occur at distinct levels –
personal, professional, and systemic – throughout their transformations journey. Rigidity is a common feature of systems undergoing change and is found within institutions where transformations work occurs, expressed through obstacles such as insufficient financial resources, barriers to collaborative work, and the low priority accorded to action-oriented research.
The next section of this issue highlights three exciting projects the TC has been conducting. The first, by TC staffer Oisin Gill and colleagues, is a deep dive into our Systems Change Education Catalog, which we developed as a resource for students, researchers, and practitioners. The analysis identified three distinguishing characteristics of systems change education programs: audience, pedagogies, and competencies. The second article, by TC staffer Michelle Benedum and colleagues, shares insights from a dialogue session organized by the TC on the ‘Pathways’ Transformative Knowledge Network (TKN), held at the 2022 Sustainability Research and Innovation Congress, a TC partner organization. The last article, by Niko Schäpke and Richard Beecroft, provides guidance on how to monitor and evaluate of highly participatory experimental spaces for transformation, known as “real-world labs”, “living labs” or “transformation labs”. These projects are examples of how the TC supports the spread of innovative techniques, integrative leadership practices, and resources for systems education.
The third section of this issue contains three case studies of efforts to apply the three transdisciplinary capacities of participatory diagnosis, expertise in knowledge co-production, and collective action. The first, by Glenn Page and colleagues, explores how to integrate Indigenous wisdom and western science, confront issues of colonization, and enable collective “seeing” of complex systems through bioregional learning journeys in Casco Bay, Gulf of Maine, USA. The second, by Lee Frankel Goldwater and Abbey Kingdon-Smith, shares lessons for network leadership and practice from a five-year study of the Savory Global Network, a multi-scalar learning network that promotes transformations to regenerative ranching. The last case, by Mary Ann Boyer and Harrison Lundy, is a close look at Philadelphia’s People Advancing Reintegration (PAR) Recycle Works, which pursues social justice and environmental responsibility by coordinating over 200 organizations to collect e-waste, provides transitional employment to people returning from prison, and offers education in digital and financial literacy, conflict management, and mental health strategies.
Our last section contains two excerpts from two influential books that contain core insights for transformations practitioners. A chapter from Peter Plastrik and colleagues’ second book on social innovations networks explores four distinct network leadership roles: Innovation Broker, Network Weaver, Trusted Strategist, and Storyteller. In a chapter from her book on quantum systems change, TC’s founder Karen O’Brien explores how our intentions, assumptions, and values influence our agency and capacity to engage with systems change. O’Brien focuses attention on our continuous “intra- actions” within one entangled system and underscores the importance of actions based on values that apply to the whole, such as equity, dignity, and compassion.
We hope you enjoy this special issue highlighting the creativity and vigor of transformations practice. We invite you to join the TC as we develop new leadership practices, institutional arrangements, and participatory techniques to bring desirable transformations to life. Special thanks to the organizing genius of Nick Graham, the Transformations Community network weaver, our amazing intern Chukwuma Paul, and Shane Casey, a graduate student in the Masters of the Environment Program at the University of Colorado Boulder, who coordinated the production of this issue.
Featured Articles
Sustainability Transformations Practice As A Transdisciplinary And Metadisciplinary Field
Bruce Goldstein, Chukwuma Paul, David Manuel-Navarrete, and Raksha Balakrishna
What does a “transformations practitioner” do, how do they do it, and what abilities do they need to do it well? Drawing from sixty practitioner interviews or members of the Transformations Community, we explore how transformations practitioner are helping bring about a just transition toward a more sustainable future. We identify how the field is rooted in three core transdisciplinary capacities: participatory diagnosis, expertise in knowledge co-production, and collective action. The capacities primarily rely on ‘people skills’ such as interpersonal communication, personal empathy, and interactional capacity. We also describe how practitioner were not only transdisciplinarity they are also metadisciplinary, in that they sought to take what they learned in individual projects and initiatives to advance the field of transdisciplinary research through specific techniques and practices, integrative leadership practices, training, and reflexive theorizing on the nature of their practice. We identify ways that the Transformations Community is supporting each of these domains to expand the scope and reach of transformations practice.
Becoming A Transformations Pracademic (Practitioner-Academic)
David Manuel-Navarrete, Bruce Goldstein, Raksha Balakrishna, Chukwuma Paul
What are common pathways to become a “transformations pracademic”? Do these pathways depend on “inner work”, or rather just being in the right place at the right time? How do personal transformations relate to social or material ones? We draw on 60 interviews with active pracademics from around the globe to address these questions. Interviewees reflected on how they developed capacities to engage in transformations, both personally and professionally. In many cases, epiphanies and self-reflective practices led to turning points away from conventional career patterns. The sudden realization that established forms of science and practice were insufficient, and that one needs to extend one’s scope beyond conventional frames and beliefs, often happened in the form of “epistemological crises”. That is, through deeply questioning what counts as valid and useful knowledge, and how learning actually occurs. An unexpected finding was that such personal crises were often triggered by meaningful interactions with non-Western cultures, through which the epistemologies and, occasionally, ontologies of these cultures were embraced or at least recognized as equally sound to their Western counterparts. In these cases, “letting go” and “unlearning” were identified as key skills to overcome onto-epistemological crises.
Keywords: transformation pathways; inner sustainability; indigeneity, decolonization
What Are The Challenges To Being An Effective Transformations Pracademic (Practitioner-Academic)?
Raksha Balakrishna, Bruce Goldstein, David Manuel-Navarrete, Chukwuma Paul
Transformations work is central to addressing sustainability challenges in the present day. However, engaging in transformations can be a challenge in itself. This paper draws on the experiences of current transformations practitioner-academics (pracademics) to discuss the challenges and obstacles faced by them at different levels – personal, professional, systemic – throughout their transformations journey. What are the kinds of challenges faced by those engaged in sustainability transformations work? Are these challenges largely professional or more personal? Do they reflect the rigidity of systems within which transformations work is carried out? How does resistance to change or ‘transform’ take shape? What has been the experience of the transformations community in this regard? These are some questions that drive the discussion around challenges to sustainability transformations. The challenges identified by the interviewees include lack of financial resources, rigid systems and institutional structures, challenges to collaborative work, low-priority for action-oriented work and personal struggles of those who are engaged in transformations work are some of. We also highlight solutions discussed by the interviewees; and the need to address these challenges by leveraging collective experiences of the transformations community.
Keywords: lack of resources, science-practice disconnect, well-being, radical shifts
Lessons For Transformations Organizations From The Pathways Network: A Transformations Community Dialogue
Michelle E. Benedum, Bruce E. Goldstein, Adrian Ely, Marina Apgar, Laura M.Pereira, David Manuel-Navarrete
Addressing the global challenges highlighted by the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals will require a transformation of systems that created the problems in the first place. Purposefully transforming our societies is difficult, complex, and messy. Innovative change strategies often fail and there are no general solutions. And even when we have developed promising possibilities, they may falter when we try to scale them upward and outward. The Transformations Community, a global community of action researchers and reflective practitioners, organized a dialogue session on developing transformations support structures, which intertwine action and learning, such as “Transformation Labs”, “Co-Labs”, “Bright Spots”, and “Learning Networks”. In this paper, we present key insights from a dialogue session with some of the individuals who spent years developing and leading The ‘Pathways’ Transformative Knowledge Network (TKN) - an international group working on sustainability challenges in a variety of contexts.
Keywords: Transformation organization, Pathways Network, transformation, Transformation Community
Meet the Authors of this Special Issue!
