Project description
Studying past and ongoing sustainability transformations
Sustainability transformations play a vital role in addressing society's most pressing environmental problems and the impacts of global change. However, despite their significance, processes of transformative change are not well understood or extensively studied. This lack of understanding often results in difficulties in implementing and learning from past failures. Recognising the importance of sustainability transformations, the ERC-funded TRANSMOD project aims to analyse past and ongoing transformation processes and develop crucial theory that can inform future successful transformations. The project will examine the changes that occur due to variations in agency and the process of change itself. To achieve this, advanced interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary methodologies will be employed to enable detailed simulations of processes of change and investigate the emergence and stabilisation of new ideas in ongoing transformations.
Objective
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.
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 and biophysical dynamics.
The project will reach its objectives through an approach that transcends a focus on systemic processes versus agency by analysing change or lack thereof as emerging from their relations. It will achieve this through two methodological advancements: i) combining simulation modelling with empirical research of past transformations, which allows analysing key material and immaterial social and social-ecological processes through in-depth case studies and testing their effect on emergent system dynamics through modelling, and ii) 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.
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 applying a next generation of social-ecological models. This will enable new ways of theorising that account for the complexity of cross-scale and interconnected social-ecological dynamics of the Anthropocene.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
- social sciencessociologygovernance
- natural sciencesearth and related environmental sciencesenvironmental sciencessustainability sciences
- medical and health scienceshealth sciencesinfectious diseasesRNA virusescoronaviruses
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Keywords
Programme(s)
- HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC) Main Programme
Topic(s)
Funding Scheme
HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC GrantsHost institution
10691 Stockholm
Sweden