Pre-Conference Workshops (August 18)
Wanderers Protea Hotel, Johannesburg
Our half-day workshops provide an engaging space for learning, connection, and hands-on exploration of thought-provoking topics. Led by experienced facilitators, these interactive sessions explore critical subjects such as sustainability, governance, decolonization, and creative futures. Participants will engage in small-group discussions, hands-on activities, and real-world case studies, gaining practical tools and fresh perspectives, – all in a welcoming and dynamic setting. Plus, enjoy a refreshing tea break with snacks as you recharge and connect with fellow participants.
Transformative Researchers with Impact
[August 18, 09:00-12:00 SAST]
Facilitator: Karen O’Brien
Researchers and research-related professionals around the world are working from a deep commitment to contribute not only to knowledge production, but to results that address global challenges. Recognizing their stake in the outcomes, they are interested in narrowing the gap between knowledge and action in a transformative way.
Despite this commitment and the enormous time spent on research-related activities, many feel that they are not realizing their full potential for impact. Embedded in an academic system and culture that promotes competition, elitism, hierarchy, and overwork, researchers sometimes experience a sense of insignificance, overwhelm, and potential burnout.
We invite researchers, research-related professionals and practitioners to address these pressing questions and issues in this workshop. Participants will be introduced to an innovative “framework for action” for transformations to sustainability, as well as tools to help them explore and develop their own capacities and collaborative power.
The workshop will be framed and facilitated by Professor Karen O´Brien, a scientist at the forefront of research on climate change and transformations to sustainability. The event is organized by cCHANGE in collaboration with the Transformations Community.
Workshop: Envisioning Pluriversal Futures Through Fashion and Culture
[August 18, 09:00-13:00 SAST]
Facilitator: Clarice Garcia
This 4 hour workshop aligns with the conference theme, ‘Bridging and Bonding,’ and invites participants to collaboratively explore how design and foresight practices can foster diverse and pluriversal narratives about sustainable futures in light of cultural and societal transformations. Using fiction and fashion artefacts as a medium for creative futures-thinking, attendees will investigate the cultural values and beliefs shaping visions for transitions towards sustainable and inclusive worlds.
Participants will self-identify as having Global North or Global South cultural backgrounds and engage in a structured envisioning process. Working in culturally distinct groups, they will co-conceptualise fictional fashion artefacts and future scenarios through drawing and descriptive text.
At the conclusion, a facilitated discussion will encourage reflection on the differences and similarities in narratives, values, and perspectives between Global North and Global South groups. This workshop aims to highlight the influence of cultural contexts on futures thinking and challenge universalist approaches to design and foresight. By comparing alternative visions, participants will share insights into pathways for making these practices more inclusive, democratic, and pluriversal.
This Coastal Town: Learning from a Collaborative Exercise in Preparing for Uncertain Futures
[August 18, 09:00-12:00 SAST]
Facilitator: Ann Light, Ruth Wolstenholme
In this half-day workshop, we conduct and review the 2-hour empowerment exercise #thiscoastaltown, devised to inspire Felixstowe (UK) residents to prepare creatively for the uncertain futures that await, especially in a small coastal town. Set in the near-future, before/after the Decade of Lost Summers, the collaborative action uses immersive and participatory techniques to encourage an agentic perspective on future challenges, exploring new human-world relations. Part-way between a game and a crisis management meeting, the exercise has been adapted for use in a range of settings so that other coastal towns may experiment with it. It is brought to offer an experiential space for reflection with scholars and practitioners interested in inclusive change-making and more-than-human considerations. The exercise, followed by reflective techniques to draw out insights, offers a base from which to discuss the value of methods such as live action role-play (LARP) and the genre of imaginative exercises that place participants in agentic problem-solving roles. The goal of the imaginative exercise is to encourage local action from a hopeful but realistic starting point. The goal of the workshop is to share ideas on what constitutes effective mobilisation through play and how to sustain it after the event.
Workshop for Conflict Transformation: Navigating Complex Sustainability Dilemmas by Fostering Shared Identity
[August 18, 09:00-12:00 SAST]
Facilitator: Kinga Psiuk
In this workshop session, we will explore tools for fostering shared group identity in conflict transformation of complex sustainability dilemmas. Using an adapted version of the ASPIRe process, participants will engage in a role-play activity to collectively navigate a conflict scenario. The ASPIRe process is a combination of focus group discussions and forums, involving: 1) identifying key goals for each stakeholder, 2) forming sub-groups based on overlapping interests, 3) negotiating towards a common goal, and 4) articulating clear intentions to work collectively and establish a compliance framework. The session will be based on a real-life sustainability case, with participants assigned various roles, positions, and value systems they will have to act upon. This practice-based, policy-focused activity offers a chance to test a new approach to conflict transformation and discuss its potential for governance more broadly. The session aligns with conference themes such as ‘Bridging and Bonding,’ given the collaborative nature of the activity that recognises plurality of ways of knowing and doing, and ‘Governance and Multilateralism under Pressure,’ aiming to promote democratic governance, legitimize various lived realities, dismantle unequal power dynamics, and build long-term capacities for navigating differences.
(Un)-Blanketing Indigenous Climate Observatories: a co-reflective and co-creative session on how to work knowledges together to support local communities.
[August 18, 09:00-13:00 SAST]
Facilitator: Lizette Reitsma
Positioned within the bridging and bonding theme, we propose a collaborative exploration of what an Indigenous Climate Observatory could look like, which, through local knowledges, supports local action. As a foundation for the exploration, we build on observatories that were already made within the Indigenous Climate Observatory project that we have been running over the past 3 years. Within those climate change observatories, we brought together researchers and institutions working to understand climate change, and Indigenous communities who experience climate change in their daily lives. The proposed interactive session will take participants through our journey of creating observatories and share our insights. To make the observatories concrete, we used blankets and stamps to align our understandings of the observatories, how we observe changes within those observatories and what those changes mean. By now, we have a collection or co-created blankets, and the collection is growing. In the interactive session, we will create a blanket in which we bring together our reflections on what Indigenous Observatories could be and how they could be used for taking action and supporting change. In this session, we aim to bring together a wide variety of people, both those who participate and facilitate.
Co-creating Governance Options for the Use of Transformative Technologies in Biodiversity Conservation
[August 18, 09:00-12:00 SAST]
Facilitator: Pedro Fidelman
Cutting-edge technological interventions—such as assisted evolution, solar radiation management, and gene drive—are emerging as potential solutions to the global biodiversity crisis. These transformative technologies have the potential to fundamentally change how biodiversity conservation is approached. However, their implementation requires equally transformative governance frameworks that foster responsible innovation while ensuring safeguards for society and the environment.
This workshop will use scenario mapping to:
1. Explore governance challenges posed by transformative conservation technologies, including the pace of innovation, risk ambiguity, and ethical dilemmas.
2. Co-develop governance options that support responsible innovation using frameworks such as anticipatory governance, adaptive management, and participatory decision-making.
3. Generate actionable strategies to navigate governance challenges, identifying practical pathways for implementation.
Australia’s Great Barrier Reef will serve as a real-world case study. Through interactive discussions, scenario mapping, and collaborative exercises, participants will co-create governance pathways for transformative conservation technologies. By the end of the session, participants will have fit-for-purpose strategies for addressing governance complexities and guidance on their application in practice. Workshop insights will be synthesised into a post-session brief, shared with participants, and presented in the conference plenary.
Meaning ∞ Making: Artistic transgressive & transformative research in the polycrises
[August 18, 14:00-17:00 SAST]
Facilitators: Dylan McGarry, Neil Coppen, Mpume Mthombeni
This workshop uses a ‘call and response’ Empatheatre methodology, to develop a collaborative intelligence with participants that supports not only academic rigor, but political, cultural, emotional and spiritual rigour in our research praxis. The workshop interrogates the last decade of transgressive and transformative arts-based research led by Empatheatre, a collective of artists, theatre makers, musicians, writers, Indigenous leaders, customary rights holders, citizens and scientists emerging from South Africa. Participants will have the potential to navigate case studies in local and international contexts, and surface practices and principles of how to conduct grounded, collaborative, co-designed and public forms of enquiry in complex, risk-laden and constantly shifting learning environments. The workshop is designed to allow participants to “choose their own adventure” in how they would like to draw from the body of work in ways that are useful to their own contexts, questions and struggles. Working at the intersection between social and ecological justice, and supporting scholar activist research, the Empatheatre facilitators will use short films, interactive dialogical tools and other modalities to explore ways in which we can create ‘in-movement’ research, that can handle the many shifting realities we face today in the climate and poly crises. See www.empatheatre.com for more information.
Leveraging anticipation and imagination in the governance of threshold changes in social-ecological systems
[August 18, 14:00-17:00 SAST]
Facilitators: Carina Wyborn, Laura Pereira, Michele-Lee Moore, Joost Vervoort, Manjana Milkoreit, Carla Alexandra
Many iconic social-ecological systems are on the threshold of transformational change. In some cases, change will be triggered by ecological degradation, in others by positive strategic efforts to reorganise society. People living and working within these systems are facing a horizon of dramatic change, grappling with hope and grief in anticipation of what may come.
While some places have faced life-altering disruptions through colonisation and cascading disaster-events, others are yet to face dramatic ruptures to their social-ecological fabric. This workshop will wrestle with the governance challenges and tensions associated with imagining and acting on anticipated future changes, while attending to historical and contemporary dynamics driving change.
The workshop will centre creative practices as tools to bring together diverse ideas and challenge power structures to engage with governance dynamics in contested and uncertain places. Participants will explore practical frameworks (i.e. ‘resist, accept, direct’) and creative interventions (i.e. participatory theatre) to enable challenging conversations and build possibilities for hope and agency.
Discussions will focus on definitions, processes, challenges, and practices, alongside fostering a network for critical reflections. We will share practices and articulate a repertoire of skills to support decision-making in threshold changes and develop a bank of possibilities for those navigating complex spaces.
Transformative Governance for Biodiversity: Frameworks, theories and approaches to accelerate transformative change
[August 18, 14:00-17:00 SAST]
Facilitators: Yves Zinngrebe, Niki Frantzeskaki, Rafael Calderon Contreras, Ina Lehmann, Frederick Dahlmann
This conference session will discuss the debate on transformative governance for biodiversity by flagging specific enabling factors and barriers and by connecting different strains of literature related to the topic. We will base this session on inputs from a special issue with ESG journal on the same topic. Authors and invited participants of the session will be asked to extract the central factors and enabling conditions for transformative based on their research. During the session we will briefly give an overview on the results and a proposal for a conceptual framework. We will then conduct a world café focussing on the following research questions:
1. How can innovative arrangements of institutions and structures induce and navigate transformative change for biodiversity conservation and sustainability?
2. How can power structures be altered to induce a just social-ecological transformation?
3. How can visions and visionary processes induce and guide transformative governance?
4. What frameworks, theories and approaches of transformation exist related to how change in governance processes can be induced?
5. What characteristics make governance structures adaptive, reflexive and anticipatory?
Results will be captured on flip charts and carefully recorded. They will result in a synthesis paper in the ESG special issue on transformative governance for biodiversity.
Bridging the gap - getting money where it needs to go. A collaborative learning workshop.
[August 18, 14:00-17:00 SAST]
Facilitators: Katharina Weber, Heidi Barends
The accelerating loss of biodiversity and widespread deforestation threaten the planet’s ecological balance, undermining critical services like climate regulation, water management, and biodiversity preservation. Addressing these crises requires financial mechanisms that prioritise conservation and the equitable allocation of resources.
This 3-hour workshop explores the question: How do we get money where it needs to go? Using the Tropical Forest Forever Facility (TFFF) – a visionary proposal introduced by Brazil at the COP 16 Biodiversity Summit. As a starting point, participants will examine ways to address current market failures in finance. The TFFF proposes direct payments for the preservation and restoration of tropical forests, explicitly valuing their ecosystem services to move ecological sustainability to the forefront of global financial systems.
Through experiential learning, participants will simulate a world with radically different power dynamics. By assuming diverse roles – including indigenous communities, traditional leaders, financiers, environmental advocates, and future generations – participants will explore how shifting power structures impact conservation outcomes and resource flows.
Facilitated by the head of sustainable finance at Absa, a pan-African bank, and a PhD student from the University of Amsterdam, the workshop links academia and practice as well as Global South and Global North perspectives.
Designing Inspiring Workshops in Transdisciplinary Research on Transformations: Tools, Concepts, and Proficiencies
[August 18, 14:00-17:00 SAST]
Facilitators: Susanne Moser, Connie Nshemereirwe
This workshop is aimed at researchers experienced in transdisciplinary ways of working, and who are interested in developing trainings or courses in trandisciplinary work for others. The workshop is also meant for academics or “pracademics” who consider themselves “boundary spanners”, i.e., someone who works with academic researchers and societal actors on sustainability or transformations projects. A global consortium of leading TD scholars/thought leaders and practitioners, including trainers from five continents, has developed a guide which aims to lead TD scholars interested in training others through the process of designing audience-tailored, interactive trainings and identifying relevant and appropriate modules and materials. This workshop will give participants opportunity to practice designing an inspiring training workshop or course, using the guide, and experiencing selected interactive tools from the guide to get an experiential taste of what the guide offers. The immediate benefits/outcomes include: (1) practice using the design guide by going through the process of designing an interactive and inspiring training or course in TD; (2) first-hand experience of using selected tools commonly used in a transdisciplinary project; (3) direct access to the full training design guide and related training tools; and (4) connection to others learning to train people in TD.
A theory of Change: Pathways to Equitably Leaving Fossil Fuels Underground
[August 18, 14:00-17:00 SAST]
Facilitators: Clara McDonnell, Frank de Morrée, Augusto Heras, Janina Herzog-Hawelka, Moataz Talaat, Opal Morales Asencio, Yang Chen
Rapidly phasing out fossil fuels to mitigate climate change requires a profound transformation of the fossil fuel industry’s key actors: oil and gas companies, governments, and investors. This transition demands reimagining governance principles and fostering inclusive models that prioritize transformative justice. Countervailing powers and democratic mechanisms are essential to empower diverse stakeholders, enhance citizen engagement, and address entrenched power dynamics in fossil fuel governance.
This workshop examines two key change agents, social activism and the financial system, focusing on strategies and resources needed to overcome political challenges and resource constraints in sustainability transitions. It aims to identify governance models that integrate multilateral cooperation, effective legal interventions, and democratic participation to keep fossil fuels underground.
The initiative features two parallel workshops: one on grassroots movements and another on finance. By bridging local activism and global financial mechanisms, it seeks to develop actionable policy recommendations in a final session. These recommendations will promote participatory democracy, innovative governance frameworks, and equitable sustainability pathways. This approach addresses power imbalances, fosters transformative change, and aligns with global environmental goals, advancing the imperative to leave fossil fuels in the ground.
TC/ESG25 Conference
August 18–21, 2025
Johannesburg, South Africa
TCX-York
June 25–27, 2025
University of York, UK
TC/ESG25 Conference starts in:
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