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Collective agency, the capacity of individuals to mobilise according to shared goals, is crucial for social–ecological transformation. However, in stagnant situations, where individuals in a social–ecological system tend to resist transformation due to interests in the status quo, the emergence of collective agency faces numerous barriers. This res...
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... Similarly, the crucial question of collective agency could only sparsely be addressed in this review due to the absence of clear theoretical development in the publications included within the scope of this review (notable exceptions are Ibrahim, 2017 andCharli-Joseph et al. 2023). This shall not suggest that sustainability transformations research is not examining the actions of collectives and how they emerge since particularly initiatives or social movements and their collective action are key topics of study in the field. ...
The conceptualization of agency for the purpose of sustainability transformation research remains a pivotal yet elusive subject, requiring to capture the inherent interactive complexity of the agent's individual attributes and their socio-material embeddedness while providing enough clarity for empirical applicability. While significant advancements have been made in conceptualizing agency in recent years, the discourse has been characterized as scattered, using inconsistent terminology and drawing on ambiguous analytical lenses. This paper addresses these issues by providing a systematic-narrative review of the literature up to the year 2023 around concepts of agency in sustainability transformation research. On the basis of 157 included articles, three central conceptual claims are made to bring the debate forward: First, seven questions on agency are put forward as a theoretical tool to structure both past and future debate on agency, discussing the state of the art of definition, source of agency, relationships to transformative change, structure, power, determinants of actions' qualitative characteristics as well as theoretical foundations. Second, a typology of prototypical perspectives on agency is proposed, distinguishing between singular, embedded, and relational/emergent agency approaches. Third, drawing on insights from the systematic literature review as well as from discussions in sociology (Giddens, Archer, Emirbayer & Mische, Sewell), it is suggested to bring particularly singular and embedded agency perspectives constructively together by conceptualizing agency as the capability of an agent to perform intentional action (as a result of some reflective deliberation) within specific spatio-temporal contexts.
... Processes of co-production enable moving from individually held perceptions of problems and solutions to shared and collective understandings. To illustrate, Charli-Joseph et al. (2023) present their methodological strategy for hosting a Transformation Laboratory in Xochimilco, Mexico, to address tensions over land tenure and water use between different local groups. They outline a process for moving from deconstructing narratives to jointly creating and enacting new ones. ...
... By relating their own perceptions to those held by others, participating actors had an opportunity to reflect on their own stances, knowledge, and values (as demonstrated by Somerville et al. 2011), as well as different ways of viewing the water governance issue on the island. Since dialogue-based processes, such as the one presented here, create a space for shifting problem frames through negotiating differences and rethinking own positions (Charli-Joseph et al. 2023), we will discuss the role of a careful and deliberate workshop design for mobilizing, articulating, and connecting knowledge to nurture collective action (see Fig. 5). ...
... The willingness of actors working at bridging organizations, such as Hushållningssällskapet, an association providing agriculture and forestry extension services, and Öland's Water Council, to support farmers in looking for funding for testing different interventions presents one such example from the third workshop on Öland. Charli-Joseph et al. (2023) highlight how "[s]ocial interactions, such as group discussions, community meetings, participatory workshops, or informal conversations, provide opportunities for people to […] create social and affective connections necessary for a sense of collective agency" (p. 1218). ...
Enabling diverse actors to address interlinked sustainability issues is important and challenging. This paper focuses on how to design a dialogue-based knowledge co-production process to nurture collective action. Using the conceptualization of systems, target, and operational knowledge as the guiding framework, we designed and combined different complementary activities to invite actors to look at a wicked problem through multiple lenses and reflect on their own positions, perspectives, knowledge, and values. With a carefully documented workshop series held with local actors on Öland, Sweden, as our empirical case study, we demonstrate how we moved from exploring the multifunctionality of landscapes and understanding actors’ different values, preferences, and priorities, to developing four strategies for effectively accelerating and expanding efforts to adapt to climate change. Our study reveals how the process of mobilizing, articulating, and connecting individually held systems, target, and operational knowledge nurtures collective action. It also leverages dialogue-based processes as cornerstones in addressing sustainability challenges in an inclusive and equitable way.
... For example, Ernstson (2011, p. 258) uses social network analysis to explore transformation in the Stockholm Urban Park, Sweden, presenting agency as 'a relational property that is a function of individual skills, the relations among various actors, and on network structures they create'. Meanwhile, Charli-Joseph et al. (2023, p. 1215) examine practices that nurture collective agency in the Xochimilco wetlands in Mexico City, describing a three-step process of '1) questioning dominant narratives about a situation, (2) building capacities to reframe the situation, and (3) enacting new compelling narratives that support the group's transformative agency'. Kok et al. (2021, p. 1) combine complex adaptive systems, relational sociology, new materialism, and actor network theory, to extend agency beyond the human into collectives of humans, material infrastructures, and ecological assemblages, presenting agency as an 'embedded and temporal capacity for reorientation'. ...
... One example of a potential transformative space is the Transformation Lab (T-Lab) trialled in places across the Global South and North (Pathways Network 2018). Charli-Joseph et al. (2023, p. 1229) describe a T-Lab in the Xochimilco wetlands, Mexico City, highlighting that 'the T-Lab space-process was not only about discussion and verbalisation, but also about experiencing, doing, and affectively relating in new ways' (see also Siqueiros-Garcia et al. 2022). This focus on experience, affect, and embodiment resonates with Kok et al.'s (2021, p. 9) call for transformations research to work more closely with the agency of materiality and non-human participants in complex systems. ...
Transformations to sustainability require alternatives to the paradigms, practices, and policies that have generated social-ecological destruction and the Anthropocene. In sustainability science, several conceptual frameworks have been developed for transformations, including social-ecological, multi-level, transformative adaptation, and pathways approaches. There is a growing shift towards recognising transformations as ‘shared spaces’ involving multiple ways of knowing, being, and doing. Diverse relational approaches to transformations are increasingly articulated by Indigenous, humanities, and social science scholars, practitioners, and activists from the Global South and North. Broadly, relational approaches enact alternatives to separable categories of society and nature, emphasise unfolding relations between human and non-human beings, and highlight the importance of ethical responsibilities and care for these relationships. Yet while it is important to recognise the collective significance of diverse relational lifeways, practices, and philosophies to transformations, it is also vital to recognise their differences: efforts to produce universal frameworks and toolboxes for applying relationality can reproduce modernist-colonialist knowledge practices, hinder recognition of the significance of relational approaches, and marginalise more radical approaches. In this paper we explore five intersecting ‘relationalities’ currently contributing to discussions around transformations: (i) Indigenous-kinship, (ii) systemic-analytical, (iii) posthumanist-performative, (iv) structural-metabolic, and (v) Latin American-postdevelopment. We explore how these different relational approaches address key concepts in transformations research, including human-nature connectedness; agency and leadership; scale and scaling; time and change; and knowledge and action. We suggest that their diversity gives rise to practices of transformations as ‘walking together in a world of many worlds’ and support intercultural dialogue on sustainability transformations.
... It requires developing methods that ensure scientific rigor while allowing adaptability and seizing new windows of opportunity [46]. This includes activities and tools to keep societal actors engaged even while only intangible process-oriented outcomes are generated [47][48][49][50]. Navigating these challenges requires researchers to advance frameworks, methods, practical guidance, and at a structural level to advocate for an academic system that acknowledges and rewards transformative research. ...
... From the perspective of researchers, a key priority is to further advance TTDR by providing theoretically wellfounded, methodological and experience-based guidance on the practicalities of doing TTDR. Meaningful relations are key to managing emergence, both for dealing with unexpected and undesirable change, as well as being able to capitalize on opportunities [50,51]. A key priority for adapting structural conditions in the science system can be identified here as well because existing academic training and supervision are insufficient to prepare researchers -especially on an early-career level -for the challenging tasks of transformative research [51,52]. ...
In response to the climate and biodiversity crisis, the number of transdisciplinary research projects in which researchers partner with sustainability initiatives to foster transformative change is increasing globally. To enable and catalyze substantial transformative change, transformative transdisciplinary research (TTDR) is urgently needed to provide knowledge and guidance for actions. We review prominent discussions on TTDR and draw on our experiences from research projects in the Global South and North. Drawing on this, we identify key gaps and stimulate debate on how sustainability researchers can enable and catalyze transformative change by advancing five priority areas: clarify what TTDR is, conduct meaningful people-centric research, unpack how to act at deep leverage points, improve engagement with diverse knowledge systems, and explore potentials and risks of global digitalization for transformative change.
... uncertainties, contested knowledge claims, and insufficient public governance helped create a field for disputing the centrality of agricultural responsibility in nutrient overenrichment. In this paper, I describe how I engaged in a transformative co-production process (Pereira et al. 2020, Charli-Joseph et al. 2023) with a group of actors holding polarized positions in this dispute and interrogate how and why the relational dynamics shifted along the way. ...
... In this literature, transformation is understood as change that happens at personal, collective, and systemic levels (Charli-Joseph et al. 2018). The underlying rationale is that opening up spaces for various actors to come together and collaboratively reframe social-ecological problems can bear collective agency to enact changes (Dewulf et al. 2009, Charli-Joseph et al. 2023). In-depth dialogue, facilitation, and experimentation are key ingredients in the purposeful deconstruction of dominant narratives and the co-creation of new ones. ...
... Furthermore, it considers that collective identities and worldviews are not coherently derived from broad values but are idiosyncratic configurations of seemingly incompatible values and beliefs [98]. From this follows the involvement of methods including visual and narrative expression and group-forming [99,100], and common or divergent reframing [101,102] that help participants express, imagine, and passionately experience new chains of meaning. ...
The identity-laden conflict comprising clashing biodiversity values can hinder the integration of plural biodiversity values into policy. Until now, research on the elicitation and negotiation of biodiversity values approached this task by applying an economic or a deliberative model to guide the elicitation of values and transformation knowledge regarding their negotiation. However, both models have weaknesses in generating robust and transformative outcomes, which lie in their approach to dealing with identity conflicts and their related passions and affects. To address this gap, I explain how research has used both models and discuss how an agonistic model can improve the debate. I will show that current models highlight integrating and synergising values. In contrast, the agonistic model aims at eliciting distinctive values that challenge hegemonic values and the unsustainable status quo. Thereby, it implies dealing with and utilising passions and affects within the research process. Implications and operational suggestions for biodiversity value research applying the agonistic model are outlined. These include changes in the research structure, eliciting negative attributions and marginalised or missing values, and altered communication within group valuation settings. This article is relevant to researchers in biodiversity valuation and facilitators of value negotiations that aim to achieve value integration.
... Prior empirical research suggests that fostering collective agency or identity can effectively counteract individual resistances to changing the status quo (c.f. Charli-Joseph et al. 2023;Kok et al. 2023;Page et al. 2016). Moreover, collaboration could enable trust-building among the different personas, thereby contributing to expanding networks and boost collective power to address climate change in transformative ways (c.f. ...
... Urban Labs lend themselves particularly well to testing the proposed mindset shift strategies given that they entail real-world experimentation by a diverse range of stakeholders and have shown to be effective for inter alia, building trust, co-developing innovative solutions, facilitating knowledge and capacity sharing, learning by doing and empowering marginalized and disadvantaged communities (Charli-Joseph et al. 2023;Kok et al. 2023;Nevens et al. 2013;Ziervogel et al. 2021). Furthermore, Urban Labs cater to the need for longitudinal research to track mindset shifts over time and evaluate the efficacy of these strategies (Dweck and Yeager 2019). ...
Increasing calls for transformation to address climate change and related challenges underscore the societal imperative to shift from mindsets that drive environmentally unsustainable and socially unjust processes to mindsets that enable urban sustainability transformations. However, it is not always clear what such mindsets comprise, if and how they can be shifted and under which conditions. Fragmented understandings of the concept of mindsets across disciplines and limited empirical analysis beyond Europe and North America have hindered progress in this field. To address these gaps, this article proposes a novel conceptual and analytical framework for identifying mindsets. The framework is applied to data collected from an exploratory survey involving over 150 participants from five Urban Labs in Argentina, Brazil and Mexico. Through cluster analysis, three distinct personas are identified: the Skeptical Activist, the Optimist Technocrat and the Bystander with Mixed Feelings. These are fictional characters that represent groups of individuals with defining mindsets, demographic characteristics, capacities, trust levels and network features. Results offer valuable insights into the emotions, beliefs, values, perceptions, attitudes and worldviews that guide the behavior of diverse stakeholders, from policymakers to often marginalized community groups, in urban climate governance. Despite its limitations, namely the relative homogeneity of our non-randomized sample, the article advances the understanding of the human dimension of climate change and its interlinkages with urban development goals. It also proposes social innovation strategies to trigger mindset shifts, foster climate action and accelerate urban sustainability transformations.
... Agency perspectives have been prominent in literature on deliberate transformations (e.g. Westley et al. 2011Westley et al. , 2013Scoones et al. 2020;Charli-Joseph et al. 2022), but remain scarce in relation to resilience capacities. Existing definitions and frameworks on resilience capacities from a social-ecological perspective have remained structural, lacking theories of agency. ...
... Further enriching our understanding of agency is the work of social theorists who focus on its relational nature, meaning that agents are always situated in manifold social relations (Burkitt 2016). Overfocussing on the actions of individuals can lead us to overlook both the networks of interdependence in which agency is exercised, and the collective arrangements through which agency is often shaped and channelled (Charli-Joseph et al. 2022). People live their lives in complex webs of relationships, and inhabit multi-layered social identities which entail rights and obligations in respect to others (Schnegg and Linke 2015). ...
Resilience has become increasingly popular in sustainability research and practice as a way to describe change. Within this discourse, the notion of resilience as the capacity of people, practices and processes, to persist, adapt or transform is particularly salient. The ability to bounce back from shock (persistence) or to take adaptive measures to cope with change are most commonly attributed to resilience, but at the same time, there is a strong push for a transformation agenda from various social and environmental movements. How capacities for resilience are enacted and performed through social practices remains relatively underexplored and there is potential for more dialogue and learning across disciplinary traditions. In this article, we outline the ‘Resilience Capacities Framework’ as a way to a) explicitly address questions of agency in how resilience capacities are enacted and b) account for the dynamic interactions between pathways of persistence, adaptation and transformation. Our starting point is to conceptualise future pathways as co-evolved, whereby social and ecological relationships are shaped through processes of selection, variation and retention, enacted in everyday practices. Drawing on theories of bricolage and structuration, we elaborate on the role of actors as bricoleurs, consciously and non-consciously shaping socio-ecological relationships and pathways of change. Informed by cases of rural change from mountain areas, we explore the extent to which an approach focusing on agency and bricolage can illuminate how the enactment of resilience capacities shapes intersecting pathways of change.
... In this matter, it has been detected that many producers do not know how to face these challenges, which makes practical and specific training as well as professional advice essential to carry out said updates. In this regard, working on these problems, but also co-working on the social agency and on the importance of reframing in building collective agency -understood as the capacity of individuals to mobilize according to shared goals-is crucial for social-ecological transformation (Charli-Joseph et al., 2022). ...
... Its premise is that the performances of experimentations may be more open, but science is the orchestrator (Alsonso-Yanez et al. 2020). In parallel, lab approaches span the societally driven to research-driven , as well as from the solutions-oriented (Lee et al., 2011) or challenge-oriented (Charli-Joseph et al., 2022). Towards the research-driven and solutions-oriented side of this spectrum, Asenbaum & Hanusch (2021) note that: ...
... learning space -connect to the relational and affective implications of grappling with complex sustainability challenges in education(Akkerman et al., 2021;Jickling et al., 2021;Vogel & O'Brien 2022). They speak to mismatches between the time needed to bring such challenges into being, versus the time provided during courses; the moments where the student or teacher impulse for strong direction may misalign with course design and emergent outcomes; and when we introduce problem frames from stakeholders into the course, recognizing that this may skew the progression of the course.Inner dimensions of change are argued to deepen the learning process through supporting shared awareness and collective actions (see e.g.,Brundiers et al. 2010;Wamsler & Brink, 2018;Charli-Joseph et al. 2022). Regarding the topic of evaluation, the notion of inner dimensions of change raises daunting questions around whether it is helpful to understand evaluation as an analytical exercise, or as a series of social practices centred on upgrading learning. ...
We live in a time of compounding ecological and social change. Given the uncertain and
urgent nature of ongoing transformations, contemporary forms of governance are
experiencing a central tension. The tension between controlling the present and nurturing
collective capacities to enact transformative change. Amidst a wave of interest in transitions
and transformations in-the-making, labs in real-world contexts have entered the discussion.
Labs have emerged as appealing, novel and highly complex entities that situate and localize
engagement around complex sustainability challenges. Labs carry a systemic view of
change; they comprise alternative and experimental approaches; they carry a normative
assumption that research has plural roles; and they hold an explicit learning orientation that
infuses knowledge with action.
Given the unfolding of labs in the real world, my involvement in their design, and ongoing
interests in treating both meanings and processes of sustainability, this thesis is organized
around a curiosity. Its overarching aim is to investigate how sustainability-oriented labs
could be unpacked, designed and evaluated in the context of sustainability transitions and
transformations. Underlaboured by a critical realist philosophy of science, this thesis
investigates sustainability-oriented labs by way of a qualitative-dominant, case-based
research strategy. It does this across three overlapping research phases, culminating in four
appended papers.
In research phase one, we adopt a systematic review of sustainability-oriented labs in real-world contexts, exploring and classifying a global sample of labs according to their
engagement with sustainability. In paper II, we identify and unpack 53 sustainability-oriented
labs in real-world contexts. Through a mixed-methods analysis, we explore the
distribution and diversity of these labs, discerning the research communities which
conceptualize labs and the dimensions of their practice. In Paper III, we present an
empirically grounded typology, arriving at six different types of sustainability-oriented labs:
1) Fix and control, 2) (Re-)Design and optimize, 3) Make and relate, 4) Educate and engage,
5) Empower and govern and 6) Explore and shape.
In research phase three, paper II presents a qualitative case-based inquiry into Challenge
Lab (C-Lab), a challenge-driven learning environment. Paper II conceptualizes challenge
framing as embedded within an open-ended learning process, both on a level of practice
and space. Experiences related to framing in C-Lab shed light on how students situate
themselves and see their role within existing challenges, how they navigate limits to
knowledge in complex systems, and how they self-assess their own sense of comfort and
progress. In addition, we introduce three dilemmas that are not owned by teachers or
students but emerge, as contradiction, within the learning space.
In research phase three, paper IV presents a multi-case comparison of evaluation practices
in various sustainability transition initiatives. We conceptualize and compare the role of
evaluation as a tool that can enhance the transformative capacity of sustainability-oriented
labs and its broader family of transition experiments.
This thesis and its appended papers provide practical-experiential, empirical-conceptual
and methodological contributions on the topic of sustainability-oriented labs in real-world
contexts. In addition, it contains a layered account of an undisciplinary doctoral journey. I
do this by (1) reflecting upon each research phase, (2) providing transparent accounts of
positionality in relation to my research, (3) conceptualizing and reflecting upon
undisciplinarity as a process of becoming, and (4) providing a mobile autoethnographic
account of staying on the ground as part of a broader commitment to interrogate
knowledge practices. Moving forward, I find myself motivated by three convictions: (1)
transformations are needed, and labs are invitations in between dualisms, (2) invitations
hold the possibility of flipping big assumptions and ethical practices, and (3)
transformations presuppose fundamental change from within both research and education
knowledge systems. They hinge upon the questioning of what both are, who they are for,
and what they might need to become. In conclusion, they compel us think big, start small,
and act now.
