A just food system transformation is imperative to meet this century’s goals of environmental sustainability, economic fairness, and equitable social well-being. While considerations of justice are beginning to inform food system transformation debates, there remains a lack of conceptual and practical integration of these two historically separate disciplinary perspectives. This perspective therefore proposes the just transformation matrix (JUSTRA), which integrates justice and transformation concerns using an interrogative approach. Interrogatives probe the historical, present, and future intersections of justice with specific food system elements. If used conscientiously, the JUSTRA can assist a wide spectrum of food system actors in strategizing, implementing, and monitoring just food system transformations. It can also help stakeholders to more thoughtfully engage with power imbalances both among users and in the food system more broadly—if used “in bona fides.” Thus, while further testing is necessary to fully realize the potential of the JUSTRA, the matrix can become a powerful tool in multi-stakeholder dialogues to navigate unpredictable, diverse, and power-laden complexities of just food system transformations.

Non-Technical summary Transdisciplinary sustainability scientists work with many different actors in pursuit of change. In so doing they make choices about why and how to engage with different perspectives in their research. Reflexivity-active individual and collective critical reflection-is considered an important capacity for researchers to address the resulting ethical and practical challenges. We developed a framework for reflexivity as a transformative capacity in sustainability science through a critical systems approach, which helps make any decisions that influence which perspectives are included or excluded in research explicit. We suggest that transdisciplinary sustainability research can become more transformative by nurturing reflexivity. Technical summary Transdisciplinary sustainability science is increasingly applied to study transformative change. Yet, transdisciplinary research involves diverse actors who hold contrasting and sometimes conflicting perspectives and worldviews. Reflexivity is cited as a crucial capacity for navigating the resulting challenges, yet notions of reflexivity are often focused on individual researcher reflections that lack explicit links to the collective transdisciplinary research process and predominant modes of inquiry in the field. This gap presents the risk that reflexivity remains on the periphery of sustainability science and becomes 'unreflexive', as crucial dimensions are left unacknowledged. Our objective was to establish a framework for reflexivity as a transformative capacity in sustainability science through a critical systems approach. We developed and refined the framework through a rapid scoping review of literature on transdisciplinarity, transformation, and reflexivity, and reflection on a scenario study in the Red River Basin (US, Canada). The framework characterizes reflexivity as the capacity to nurture a dynamic, embedded, and collective process of self-scrutiny and mutual learning in service of transformative change, which manifests through interacting boundary processes-boundary delineation, interaction, and transformation. The case study reflection suggests how embedding this framework in research can expose boundary processes that block transformation and nurture more reflexive and transformative research. Social media summary Transdisciplinary sustainability research may become more transformative by nurturing reflexivity as a dynamic, embedded, and collective learning process.

Moving from a state of war or violent conflict will require a transformation, but there are no guarantees that transformations automatically lead to peace, sustainability, and justice. This review focuses on the temporary phase when a system is in limbo between the existing, dominant state and a new alternative state. We combine insights from a resilience approach to transformations with peacebuilding and transformative justice studies to focus on three roles that hybrid approaches to transformative and transitional justice may play in this phase, including 1) addressing ‘backlash’ dynamics, 2) strengthening the capacities needed to navigate cross-scale dynamics of conflict, and 3) responding to additional shocks, crises, and disturbances beyond the primary conflicts. Together, these findings advance the theoretical foundations for understanding peacebuilding as a transformative change process.

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.

Non-Technical Summary. Human societies are changing where and how water flows through the atmosphere. However, these changes in the atmospheric water cycle are not being managed, nor is there any real sense of where these changes might be headed in the future. Thus, we develop a new economic theory of atmospheric water management, and explore this theory using creative story-based scenarios. These scenarios reveal surprising possibilities for the future of atmospheric water management, ranging from a stock market for transpiration to on-demand weather. We discuss these story-based futures in the context of research and policy priorities in the present day.

Technical Summary. Humanity is modifying the atmospheric water cycle, via land use, climate change, air pollution, and weather modification. Historically, atmospheric water was implicitly considered a ‘public good’ since it was neither actively consumed nor controlled. However, given anthropogenic changes, atmospheric water can become a ‘common-pool’ good (consumable) or a ‘club’ good (controllable). Moreover, advancements in weather modification presage water becoming a ‘private’ good, meaning both consumable and controllable. Given the implications, we designed a theoretical framing of atmospheric water as an economic good and used a combination of methods in order to explore possible future scenarios based on human modifications of the atmospheric water cycle. First, a systematic literature search of scholarly abstracts was used in a computational text analysis. Second, the output of the text analysis was matched to different parts of an existing economic goods framework. Then, a group of global water experts were trained and developed story-based scenarios. The resultant scenarios serve as creative investigations of the future of human modification of the atmospheric water cycle. We discuss how the scenarios can enhance anticipatory capacity in the context of both future research frontiers and potential policy pathways including transboundary governance, finance, and resource management.

Social Media Summary. Story-based scenarios reveal novel future pathways for the management of the atmospheric water cycle.

Increasing climatic and human pressures are changing the world's water resources and hydrological processes at unprecedented rates. Understanding these changes requires comprehensive monitoring of water resources. Hydrogeodesy, the science that measures the Earth's solid and aquatic surfaces, gravity field, and their changes over time, delivers a range of novel monitoring tools that are complementary to traditional hydrological methods. It encompasses geodetic technologies such as Altimetry, Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR), Gravimetry, and Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS). Beyond quantifying these changes, there is a need to understand how hydrogeodesy can contribute to more ambitious goals dealing with water-related and sustainability sciences. Addressing this need, we combine a meta-analysis of over 3,000 articles to chart the range, trends, and applications of satellite-based hydrogeodesy with an expert elicitation that systematically assesses the potential of hydrogeodesy. We find a growing body of literature relating to the advancements in hydrogeodetic methods, their accuracy and precision, and their inclusion in hydrological modeling, with a considerably smaller portion related to understanding hydrological processes, water management, and sustainability sciences. The meta-analysis also shows that while lakes, groundwater and glaciers are commonly monitored by these technologies, wetlands or permafrost could benefit from a wider range of applications. In turn, the expert elicitation envisages the potential of hydrogeodesy to help solve the 23 Unsolved Questions of the International Association of Hydrological Sciences and advance knowledge as guidance toward a safe operating space for humanity. It also highlights how this potential can be maximized by combining hydrogeodetic technologies simultaneously, exploiting artificial intelligence, and accurately integrating other Earth science disciplines. Finally, we call for a coordinated way forward to include hydrogeodesy in tertiary education and broaden its application to water-related and sustainability sciences in order to exploit its full potential.

This chapter focuses on a social-ecological systems (SES) resilience-based approach to critically examine the relationship between tipping points and transformative change. Resilience science provides a framework for understanding the dynamics and interdependencies of complex systems and their ability to persist, adapt, or transform in response to change and uncertainty. Transformation refers to a deliberate and fundamental restructuring of a system or a set of relationships that hold a system in a particular state. We argue that the integration of a resilience-based approach to transformations can enhance the understanding of the link between tipping points and transformations, as well as the agency and capacities required to navigate them. In particular, we focus on how transformations research emphasizes the need to: better understand tipping points as one of many aspects of deeper transformation processes, include consideration of the distributed nature of agency and relationships, and how uncertainties will emerge in relation to shocks and disturbances which will surround tipping points. To achieve this, we drawing on the inter- and transdisciplinary scholarship related to transformations to sustainability including leverage points, social-ecological tipping points, disaster resilience, and case studies. We conclude that social tipping alone is insufficient; instead, there is a need for capacities to navigate the entire tipping process, or the full range of tipping dynamics, toward desired outcomes.

Policy actors address complex environmental problems by engaging in multiple and often interdependent policy issues. Policy issue interdependencies imply that efforts by actors to address separate policy issues can either reinforce (‘win–win’) or counteract (‘trade-off’) each other. Thus, if interdependent issues are managed in isolation instead of being coordinated, the most effective and well-balanced solution to the underlying problem might never be realised. This study asks if reinforcing and counteracting interdependencies have different impacts on perception and collaboration. Our empirical study of collaborative water governance in the Norrström basin, Sweden, shows that policy actors often avoid collaborating when the policy issues exhibit reinforcing interdependencies. Our evidence indicates a perceived infeasibility of acting on reinforcing interdependencies. We also find that actors do not consider counteracting interdependencies (‘trade-offs’) at all when they engage in collaboration. Further, even though actors were aware of counteracting and reinforcing interdependencies, our analyses suggest they might be less aware of the former. These findings illustrate that actors either avoid each other due to policy issue interdependencies or, at best, ignore existing interdependencies when engaging in collaboration. Our study highlights the importance of problem perception in accomplishing integrated solutions to complex environmental problems, and of how understandings of different types of interdependencies shape collaboration in environmental governance. 

COVID-19 posed threats for health and well-being directly, but it also revealed and exacerbated social–ecological inequalities, worsening hunger and poverty for millions. For those focused on transforming complex and problematic system dynamics, the question was whether such devastation could create a formative moment in which transformative change could become possible. Our study examines the experiences of change agents in six African countries engaged in efforts to create or support transformative change processes. To better understand the relationship between crisis, agency, and transformation, we explored how they navigated their changed conditions and the responses to COVID-19. We document three impacts: economic impacts, hunger, and gender-based violence and we examine how they (re)shaped the opportunity contexts for change. Finally, we identify four kinds of uncertainties that emerged as a result of policy responses, including uncertainty about the: (1) robustness of preparing a system to sustain a transformative trajectory, (2) sequencing and scaling of changes within and across systems, (3) hesitancy and exhaustion effects, and (4) long-term effects of surveillance, and we describe the associated change agent strategies. We suggest these uncertainties represent new theoretical ground for future transformations research.

Systems thinkers see the world as a series of 'systems', cohesive, interconnected entities bounded by space and time, defined by their structure and purpose, and influenced by their wider environment. Systems thinkers hold that whether natural or human made, systems share properties and dynamics that allow us to compare diverse phenomena and grasp real world complexity. Social innovation scholars use systems thinking to understand how new social processes can shift dynamics within the systems they are introduced, or shift the systems themselves, leading to wider transformation and addressing grand challenges that we face. We discuss systems, systems thinking, how systems thinking has shaped social innovation scholarship, and criticisms that aim to hold systems thinking accountable to its lofty claims of holism.