Building models of, with and for sustainability transformations

Introduction

While the need for sustainability transformations is ubiquitous, understanding why and how they succeed or fail is limited. Explanations often focus on either agency-related or systemic factors. Understanding the complex dynamics of transformations, however, requires approaches that bridge perspectives and recognize the interdependent personal, political, social, and ecological dynamics at play.

Project Overview

TRANSMOD addresses this gap through interdisciplinary analysis of transformative change in the context of natural resource governance and food systems across the Global South and North. It focuses on how novel ideas and practices emerge and take root in response to crises, such as resource decline or Covid-19, and in interaction with existing structures and processes, such as:

• Dominant narratives
• Power relations
• Biophysical dynamics

Methodological Approach

The project will reach its objectives through an approach that transcends a focus on systemic processes versus agency by analyzing change or lack thereof as emerging from their relations. It will achieve this through two methodological advancements:

1. Combining simulation modeling with empirical research of past transformations, which allows analyzing key material and immaterial social and social-ecological processes through in-depth case studies and testing their effect on emergent system dynamics through modeling.
2. Making sense of the complexities of change through engaging in ongoing change-making processes.

Together, these activities will serve the development of complexity-aware theories of transformation.

Impact on Sustainability Science

The project will open up new opportunities for sustainability science by establishing the conceptual and methodological foundations for research that goes beyond natural-social divides with the help of building and applying a next generation of social-ecological models. This will enable new ways of theorizing that account for the complexity of cross-scale and interconnected social-ecological dynamics of the Anthropocene.