Environment strategy: transformative changes for sustainability

3. Key bodies of literature informing contemporary academic debates

There are several established bodies of literature which have relevance for or specifically focus upon transformative change. We discuss these below, before exploring more recently emerging theory and practice. Firstly, we note that theorists in the social and political sciences have long proposed different conceptualisations of societal change. The latter are relevant to any questions on how societies and environments change, whether transformative, incremental or reformist etc. Such theorists have considered the nature of social orders and human-nature relations. These include structural approaches (e.g. Marx, Lenin, Gramsci, Polanyi, Fraser), theories of structuration (Giddens), social action (Weber), habitus (Bourdieu) and governmentality (Foucault). There is not space to explain all these theories, but we note their marginalisation in transformative change debates to date and in inter-governmental processes.

3.1 Sustainability sciences

Dynamics systems thinking has come to dominate environmental debates in recent years. Two major strands can be distinguished, namely, Socio-Technical Transitions (STS) theory and Socio-Ecological, Complex Adaptive Systems (SES) theory.

• STS work analyses technology, innovation and transition management. Frank Geels’ Multi-Level Perspective (MLP) Framework addresses transitions at multiple levels, including niche innovations, socio-technical regimes and landscape factors (Geels and Schot, (2007), later developed by diverse authors (Lachman, 2013, Rotmans and Loorbach, 2007 and Geels 2002, Avelino and Wittmayer, 2016, Keemp and Rotmans, 2005). Change occurs when landscape change pressures combined with niche innovations supported by networks of actors, allow for new configurations to break through changing regimes.
• Secondly, SES foregrounds emergent and non-linear dimensions of complex, adaptive systems change, emphasising the importance of adaptability and resilience in the face of environmental change, especially shocks and stresses, such as climate change, land degradation and natural hazards.
• These bodies of work have significantly advanced understanding of the interconnections between social and ecological systems (Folke 2006, West et al, 2020), plus the interplay between society and technologies (Fisher et al, 2022). They have influenced significant areas of environmental sciences research and interventions, for example in circular economy initiatives, renewable energy transitions policies, and urban transitions planning.

Critiques of dynamic systems thinking focus upon the centrality of and reliance upon technical and managerialist approaches. Technical and managerialist approaches predominate in the literature and land use policies and practices (Pelenc et. al 2019, Kenis and Lievens 2014, cited by Fisher et al, 2022^[8]). Geels and Schot (2007) responded to various such criticisms about the lack of agency and narrow assumptions about rational decision-making and sought to amend their theory. However, despite evolutions in the approach, including greater attention to issues of power and plurality (Fisher et al, 2022), systems-based approaches risk oversimplifying and depoliticizing the complex relations between, nature, society and economic systems. Moreover, researchers often overestimate the existence of consensual public policy set-ups and democratic deliberative multi-actor coordination in proposing niche innovations to shift regimes, for example. Even where these exist, it is not clear how far they can direct ‘(radically) transformative and inclusive public policies through deliberate conscious planning and institutional crafting by ‘capable’ and ‘socially inclusive’ states (Bastiaensen et al, 2021, p44).

Key to complex, adaptive systems is the emergent nature of and uncertainties in socio-ecological change processes, and the role of tipping points.^[9] Building on work on planetary boundaries and safe operating spaces for humanity (Rockstrom 2009), the recent Global Tipping Points report (2023) argues that effective global governance to tackle tipping points in equitable ways is lacking, but positive tipping points can be exploited, involving coordinated strategic interventions for disproportionately large and rapid benefits accelerating transitions. The report focuses on human sectors – energy, transport, food and land use – and highlights a range of positive tipping points,^[10] and number of strategies (avoid, shift, and improve) to achieve sectoral transformations (University of Exeter, 2023). The authors argue that sufficiency strategies can support avoid activities and these have the greatest transformative potential. The report then assumes that the global political economy cannot be changed and suggests that improving and shifting actions in relation to consumption-based economic growth will continue to gain most government and business support. This perspective is pragmatic, but it risks potentially a) dampening social mobilisations that could change the global political economy, b) ignores the ongoing effects of environmental damage on economic growth and rising economic and social costs of inaction, and c) neglects the moral questions of inter-generational justice and imperatives to tackle underlying causes. ‘Winning slowly is the same as losing’ (B. McKibben^[11]), because of biophysical tipping points, which means that is becomes exponentially harder to tackle climate change as tipping points are exceeded and as some tipping points cascade, this can trigger changes which breach other tipping points. Hence there are justice-related questions pertaining to any approach that does not address these tipping points and plans accordingly.

Leverage points (LPs) are a prominent concept in TC work, viewed as possible entry points to changing complex systems. Deeper leverage points, which are the hardest to enact (Abson et al, 2017; Riechers et al, 2021; Fischer et al, 2019) involve shifts in values and paradigms with the capacity to change an entire system. Shallower interventions focus on highly tangible leverage points that are easier to implement, but deliver only incremental change (Meadows et al, 1999). Increasingly popular in transformative change discourse, and valuable in pushing attention to more fundamental underlying causes and solutions, the notion of leverage points can also be questioned.

Leverage points identified in the literature are often very broad in nature, and not necessarily very new in content either, but may still have use in informing decision-makers. Important examples: a) reconnecting people to nature, b) restructuring institutions, and c) rethinking how knowledge is created and used in pursuit of sustainability (Abson et al, 2017). Place-based governance interventions informed by values-oriented leverage points have also been put forward (Horcea-Milcu, 2022). Place-based governance interventions are extremely valuable, but are not able to adequately challenge structures at the global scale and unaccountable corporate and high net worth individual impacts. The newer emphasis seeks to avoid a reliance upon or bias toward certain kinds of system interventions and technological approaches that are more common in scientific approaches (Dorninger, et al, 2020). Chan et al (2019)^[12] diagnose values as an indirect driver of biodiversity change and a key leverage point. However, the list they provide of leverage points and levers include a list of non-comparable elements. Included are promotion of plural concepts of prosperity on the one hand, and, on the other, the concept of responsible technology, innovation and investment.^[13] The latter is an economic and techno-scientific framing.

There are risks and limits to Leverage Points discourse, such as being mechanistic or reductionist, but help foreground the need for values and goals shifts. By assuming the capacity to exert control over supposedly mechanistic systems, this concept risks oversimplifying complexities and uncertainties. Isolating leverage points is potentially inherently inappropriate (Dorninger et al, 2020). Additionally, because deep leverage points are so difficult to achieve, it is not easy to provide evidence on how to achieve them and under what conditions. Much of the value of leverage points discourse lies in simply re-emphasizing the need for deeper values and knowledge changes and to encourage creativity and investment in processes and interventions that do not imply reinforce dominant values of unsustainability (Zuzana et al, 2023). Instead, recognizing that many changes will need to be co-developed in situated, place-based approaches, as well as a need for higher scale changes in governance. There is also a risk of slippage from deep leverage points to a narrower focus on levers, i.e. presentation of singular solutions for complex systems, instead of the more challenging, multi-faceted work of creating conditions for values, worldview and knowledge system shifts. Policy levers can reinforce technocratic approaches that place professionals as the experts (Illich, 1973), assuming they have the sole capacity to identify solutions, disempowering ordinary citizens, and approaches where (specific disciplines and types of) science and scientists dominate (Lahsen & Turnhout 2021) at the expense of other societal groups. Essentially, LP discourse seeks a move beyond reform-oriented tweaks to government policies, to consideration of wider societal change processes, involving multiple actors and deeper underlying causes of social and environmental challenges. It is important to note that TC is a relatively new field, and there is not yet consensus on what constitutes TC LPs, or even if this is a valuable way to think about TC.

3.2 Empowerment approaches

A third strand of academic transformative change theory, influenced by development studies, is the empowerment approach. This emphasises the multiplicity of pathways to sustainability transformations (Fisher et al, 2022; Scoones et al, 2020). Creating the social attributes or capacities that empower individuals and communities to act on their own behalf, and to exert agency – the deliberate exercise of individual or collective will are pre-requisites for transformative change, especially amplification of excluded interests.

Plurality is key to sustainability transformations processes. The multiplicity of future pathways towards sustainability transformation is emphasised by the empowerment approach and is a key point. There is not just one future sustainability transition and transformation, this will always be shaped by different values and forms of knowledge. Enhancing deliberative democracy is needed (Fisher et al, 2022) to tackle dominant pathways framed and supported by the powerful, and to amplify alternatives (Leach et al, 2010).

Creating scope for political mobilisation and cultural change involving a hopeful, caring, emancipatory stance is required by empowerment approaches to transformation. Such approaches de-emphasise controlling, violent or fearful futures (Scoones et al, 2020). Social movements are key to sustainability transformations and transformative capacity strengthening can mobilise individual or collective action (Scoones al, 2020).

Support is needed for progressive social movements with respect to society and environment to counter growing forces that work against sustainability, broadly defined. Effective social movements expand political opportunity, create mobilizing structures, and use cognitive and affective mobilisation through framing processes (Adams, 2017). Unfortunately, the reality is that reactionary movements are often more effective on all these fronts on the global scale than progressive movements, with more localised exceptions. For Ojeda et al (2022, p) convergence in justice-oriented political coalitions and alliances for justice are necessary to achieve change that is life-affirming. Such movements share a critique neo-liberal framings that are embedded in most nation state thinking and policies, hence the role of nation states per se with respect to transformative change is questioned. However, democratic nation states can open policy spaces to public engagement and create conditions for democratic struggle, free from persecution, at home and through international development aid, for example. This can also amplify understandings of human-nature relations that do not solely view nature as an economic resource, by foregrounding the multi-dimensional values of ‘nature’, embracing care ethics and promoting and expanding post-growth economy possibilities. Empowerment approaches are insufficient on their own and will need to be combined with structural and systems approaches (Scoones, 2020).

Deliberative democracy, political mobilisation and cultural changes are key to the empowerment approach. Moving away from control-oriented, singularised solutions, legitimated through disciplining narratives of scarcity, policymakers should instead promote adaptive, decentralised responses (Leach et al, 2010). Solutions are the result of political choices, so there is a need for scrutiny of the power relations which determine how priorities and actions are framed and by whom (Scoones et al, 2020). Inequalities can be reproduced in such processes, so it is important to invest in facilitating engagement by diverse actors in strengthening their agency for individual and collective action and supporting engagement from marginal social groups across values and ways of being. The need to build transformative capacity, including or especially among marginalised groups, with efforts to uncover plural pathways, i.e. pathways framed from the perspective of plural forms of knowledge and ways of being (Scoones et al, 2020). T-Labs have been used in intentional processes to uncover plural transformation pathways in specific geographies^[14] and there is also a growing field of speculative future-making, which complements and challenges conventional modelling and scenario construction.

3.3 Emerging approaches to Transformative Change in academia

Relationality has the potential to significantly contribute to the revitalization of sustainability efforts, but it is only just starting to be considered in practical applications. More than an individual theory, relationality is a pathbreaking turn now well-established in the environmental humanities, social sciences and arts, which it is argued can complement or challenge existing approaches to sustainability (West et al, 2019; Walsh, Böhme, J. & Wamsler, 2021). Relationality proposes a new understanding of the nature of reality, recognizing the perpetual flux of the world – i.e. that reality involves continually unfolding relations and embodied experience (i.e. giving attention to emotions and affects, not only cognitive processes) (West et al, 2019), challenging many aspects of modern thinking and growing disengagement and inaction. Thus, a key leverage point would be advancing relational thinking.

• A key aspect is the challenge to rigid dichotomies which are seen as common sense in Western scientific thinking since the Enlightenment, (Plumwood, 2002) such as a proposed separation between humans and nature (with humans having mastery of the latter, with such mastery also being connected to patriarchal and racial stratifications (Plumwood, 1993). Dynamic systems thinking, such as STS and SES, have coupled social and ecological systems change, but relationality goes a step further, suggesting that reality involves unfolding relations of interdependencies and interconnectedness, relations that are always in a process of becoming (West et al, 2019). Humans are not just part of nature, but human-nature relations are entangled. Spaces/place co-emerge or continuously unfold (Country et al, 2016).
• In relational philosophies, such as in many Indigenous philosophies, nature has spiritual and cultural import: e.g. it is seen as kin (Bird, 2022), i.e. the mountain can be kin (Foggins et al, 2021).
• Embodiment and materiality shape relations, i.e. physical bodies, material environments and non-human entities (e.g. plants, animals, microorganisms) all contribute to relational dynamics through their own labour and agency, contributing to relational dynamics and lived experiences. Humans and other living beings are fundamentally embodied, i.e. our experiences, perceptions and interactions are deeply shaped by our physical bodies and their engagement with the world around us and our bodies are situated in specific cultural, social, historical and environmental contexts, which, as our bodies sense the world, shape our identities, perceptions and interactions with the world. Our bodies enable us to move and act in the world, interacting with environments, communicating with others.
• Affects and emotions are as important as cognitive aspects of change. Individuals, communities and other entities have capacity to respond to and to co-create their relational contexts (a popular definition of this is the ‘capacity to affect and be affected’ (Deleuze and Gattari, 1988). Affect emerges not only internally or externally, but through ongoing interactions between individuals and their environments. This challenges traditional ideas of visceral reactions and emotions as solely individual or subjective phenomena, but they are situated and generated in broader socio-cultural, political and environmental contexts.
• Non-humans also have sensory worlds and agency (Latour, 2005). It is not only humans that have agency and the capacity to affect or be affected. Humans and plants, animals, and micro-organisms (Latour, 2005) as well as inanimate objects (Bennett, 2010) and phenomena such as wind or river flows, infrastructure, technologies, co-create life in assemblages (Latour, 2005) and have interdependencies. Non-humans have differing senses of the world. They have agency in it, but with differing levels of sentience (although research is rapidly evolving on this) and accountabilities. Moving beyond an anthropocentric way of thinking, means trying to think more like ‘non-humans’ to better understand the world in a more equitable manner, raising the potential for more democratic politics of multi-species justice and being cognizant of non-human agency, labour, sensory worlds and agency.
• These interdependencies encourage a focus on mutualism and reciprocity, i.e. ethics of care. where entanglements and interdependencies, and the agency, value and labour of non-humans. Values shifts may occur that move from ethics of control and exploitation to ethics of care, once the complex entanglements and interdependencies in any relational assemblage are made visible and given attention. Puig de la Bellacasa (2017, p1) explains how rather than thinking about how humans are connected to and can get involved in nature, to recognise that we are already always involved in some way or another, alongside ‘objects, other animals, living beings, organisms, physical forces, spiritual entities.’ Humans are not the only living forms to undertake care work, which circulates in the natural world – in living webs of care (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017). Feminist scholars initially shone the light on the significance of caring relationships, empathy, and responsiveness to others’ needs to guide decision-making and social justice (Tronto, 1993). This has been followed by work to show the ecological dimensions of circulating care relations. When these entanglements are recognised, there is more reason to care (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017). Ethics of care can thus be seen as key to social justice, environmental sustainability and transformative change.
• Sustainability in relational philosophy becomes less about preserving the environment or maintaining resource stocks, i.e. ‘nature’ that is out there, separate from humans and requiring wise management – concepts which developed during the European colonial expansion (Adams and Mulligan, 2003), but instead would focus on fostering regenerative relationships that contribute to collective wellbeing in an ever-changing, dynamic world. The implications of relationality are far-reaching in terms of how we organise society, economies and politics, guided by ethics of care, because other ethics and values (e.g. of individualism, consumerism etc) underpin unsustainable futures according to new research (Zuzana et al, 2023). The IPBES Values Assessment (2022) concluded, there is a need to moderate market values, and amplify alternatives based on solidarity and care.
• Amplifying relational thinking requires new speculative imaginaries for the future and amplification of existing imaginaries that are deeply sustainable, i.e. underpinned by relational thinking and ethics of care. Rather than just focusing upon scientific modelling and scenario building, based on quite restricted sets of (often implicit) assumptions, efforts are needed to support a wider range of potential futures, including those that challenge ‘common sense’ science-technology and market assumptions and mobilizing plural forms of knowledge and ways of being. Imaginaries (Castoriadis, 1987; Taylor, 2004) are individual and collective understandings of our place in the world, who we are aligned to, our values, underpinned by certain symbols, narratives and stories. New sustainability imaginaries are needed to respond to the dynamic change we are committed to already by ongoing climate change, biodiversity losses and pollution, as well as socio-technological innovations, which are based upon ethics of care, but which represent a multiplicity of potential futures to guide action, not only by policymakers, but also social movements and the public.
• Relational inquiry thus has far-reaching implications for future action by policymakers and beyond. These are explored in the next section, but here we note that critical social sciences, humanities and arts and communities are all engaged in speculative future-making for transformative change. While environment was previously understood as the sole purview of sustainability sciences, in fact, environment is now seen as part of everything – all policies dimensions are entangled with human-nature relations.