Navigating Sustainability Transformations: Backcasting, transdisciplinarity and social learning

Doctoral thesis, 2020

Complex and persistent sustainability challenges necessitate transformations into futures that are fundamentally different to what was before. Such change processes cannot be planned in traditional ways; they require reflexive modes of governing where we collectively learn how to navigate uncharted terrain while exploring it.

The aim of this thesis is to contribute knowledge on how sustainability transformations can be navigated in practice. Such efforts are essentially transdisciplinary where actors across sectors, perspectives and disciplines are brought together around a complex issue, question or challenge of concern in context. By drawing from knowledge and experience on how systems develop and the possibility to influence how they should develop, such processes seek to both understand and address complex challenges by means of resolving problematic situations and transforming established systems, structures and practices. Efforts to navigate sustainability transformations in practice are far from straightforward; they require adequate conditions including methodological support to become meaningful as well as impactful.

This thesis builds upon a backcasting from principles methodology to support engagement with complex sustainability challenges and transformations. It recognises the transdisciplinary condition of reflexive governance and the contextual contingency of such practices. It is underlaboured with critical realism and a systems-based approach and approaches deliberate and purposeful attempts to navigate transformations as processes of transformative social learning. Further, the thesis puts key attention to issues of Education for Sustainable Development.

The thesis adheres to an ethnographic research tradition with qualitative/intensive research designs, guided by three interrelated methodological moves: (1) initial engagement with cases focusing on gathering experiences from participating actors and societal effects from backcasting processes in their wider governance and learning setting, educational as well as informal; (2) conceptual development to enhance backcasting processes in transdisciplinary settings, with focus on how guiding principles for sustainability can be collectively negotiated, and; (3) analytical deepening to better understand and explain how and why experiences and effects are generated in backcasting processes with attention to their surrounding contexts. These three methodological moves resulted in five research papers, for which I dedicate this thesis to position and further discuss.

The main contributions of this thesis are: (1) a positioning of a principles-based purposeful, systemic, transformative and reflexive praxis with an associated and further developed backcasting from principles methodology. This methodology consists of a series of suggested steps, actions, guiding questions, qualities and features that seek to enhance the way complex sustainability challenges can be addressed to make efforts of navigating sustainability transformations in practice meaningful and impactful; (2) studies into a concrete curriculum model with transformational sustainability ambitions, Challenge Lab, whose curriculum design has been further conceptualised and mechanisms of learning empirically investigated. The curriculum design and associated mechanisms of learning may support the design, development, evaluation and comparison of educational initiatives that seek to create space for students to engage with complex sustainability challenges in their authentic societal context in open-ended processes together with societal actors, and; (3) an exploration of the necessity and potential value of comparing processes, effects and impacts from transformative, transdisciplinary and reflexive governance initiatives across contexts to better establish what works, for whom and why. Such knowledge moves beyond cumulation of knowledge on the particular methods and tools deployed in cases, into underlying features and mechanisms on which knowledge may be cumulated, generalised and transferred across cases and contexts.

Finally, navigating sustainability transformations in practice is as much dependent on our collective capability of stepping back to reflect by asking questions of why, as stepping forward to act by asking questions of how. This thesis introduces a further interest in exploring whether, how and to what extent backcasting as methodological frame may guide the concrete design of transdisciplinary sustainability-oriented initiatives and condition processes of transformative social learning.