COEXIST achieved three main results:
1. Advancing the notion of values as leverage points with transformative potential that can be unleashed (leveraged) for sustainability transformation. Considering values as leverage points goes beyond measuring values, understanding values, eliciting values, doing valuation, incorporating values into decision-making. Avenues for engaging with values as leverage points relate to: i) recognizing sustainability as a normative concept together with the ethical dimension of guiding, catalyzing or inciting sustainability transformations; ii) designing and organizing intentional deliberate practices for exercising values consciousness, awareness and reflexivity; iii) exploring and contemplating values from a philosophical and teleological perspective as moral principles of what is to be desired in human life.
2. Consequently, clarifying the role that science can play in mobilizing values, for example by designing instances of co-production of knowledge as an intervention, as an experiment that on the one had allows for the production of empirical evidence through iterative prototyping, tracking, documenting, evaluating and learning from cumulating outcomes, and on the other hand is weaved to and embedded in processes of social change.
3. Systematizing how to engage with values for sustainability transformation employing a complementary top-down and bottom-up perspective, at an individual, collective and societal level, and drawing on different theoretical traditions and interdisciplinary bodies of knowledge researching the link between values and change. For example, values are predictors or determinants of human behavior according to the behavioral sciences; values are leverage points according to sustainability science and social-ecological systems communities; values as guiding elements of how the world should be according to the humanities; dominant (regime) values are an expression of power according to political ecology.
These results are covered by recent publications, publications under review and in preparation. Example: Horcea-Milcu, A.-I. (2022). Values as leverage points for sustainability transformation: two pathways for transformation research. Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability, 57, 101205. doi:10.1016/J.COSUST.2022.101205
