Dinesh Abrol, Marina Apgar, Joanes Atela, Robert Byrne, Lakshmi Charli-Joseph, Victoria Chengo, Almendra Cremaschi, Rachael Durrant, Hallie Eakin, Adrian Ely, Anabel Marin, Fiona Marshall, David Ockwell, Nathan Oxley, Ruth Segal, Elise Wach, The Pathways Network, others.
Transformations to sustainability are increasingly the focus of research and policy discussions around the Sustainable Development Goals. However, the different roles played by transdisciplinary research in contributing to social transformations across diverse settings have been neglected in the literature. Transformative Pathways to Sustainability responds to this gap by presenting a set of coherent, theoretically informed and methodologically innovative experiments from around the world that offer important insights for this growing field.
The book draws on content and cases from across the ‘Pathways’ Transformative Knowledge Network, an international group of six regional hubs working on sustainability challenges in their own local or national contexts. Each of these hubs reports on their experiences of ‘transformation laboratory’ processes in the following areas: sustainable agricultural and food systems for healthy livelihoods, with a focus on sustainable agri-food systems in the UK and open-source seeds in Argentina; low carbon energy and industrial transformations, focussing on mobile-enabled solar home systems in Kenya and social aspects of the green transformation in China; and water and waste for sustainable cities, looking at Xochimilco wetland in Mexico and Gurgaon in India. The book combines new empirical data from these processes with a novel analysis that represents both theoretical and methodological contributions. It is especially international in its scope, drawing inputs from North and South, mirroring the universality of the Sustainable Development Goals.
The book is of vital interest to academics, action researchers and funders, policy makers and civil-society organisations working on transformations to sustainability.
The Pathways Network conducts action research into transformations to sustainability in six hubs across the world. Since 2015, it has been co-led (with Anabel Marin) by the editor, Adrian Ely, a Reader in Technology and Sustainability at SPRU and the STEPS Centre, University of Sussex, UK.
Sustainable development: universal goals across a divided world
The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which grew out of the Rio+20 UN Summit in Rio da Janeiro in 2012 and were agreed at the UN General Assembly in 2015, represent potentially the most ambitious, comprehensive and internationally recognised development agenda that the world has ever seen. In comparison to their forerunners the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), the 2030 Agenda and the SDGs are ‘universal’ and are envisaged to be implemented by “all countries and all stakeholders” through to 2030 (United Nations 2015). They are also transformative in their ambition, requiring systemic changes that go beyond incremental shifts in policy, behaviour or the use of technology – changes that empower the most vulnerable and genuinely “leave no-one behind”.
Five years later, unity around the goals has been unsettled by the shock of Covid-19, an infectious agent responsible for numerous medical crises, economic recessions and socio-political upheavals across the world. At the time of writing this chapter (September 2020) the ability of national governments to adopt a collaborative rather than a competitive approach to addressing Covid-19 hangs in the balance, and in many ways the world looks more divided than ever. International networks of scientists and researchers are struggling to overcome this division.
As with Covid-19 and, earlier, the MDGs, the current international development agenda poses questions for the global research community. What does this idea of “Transforming our World” (the title of the 2030 Agenda) actually mean when it is translated to the very different contexts in which we find ourselves? How can we understand and help to bring about the kinds of transformative change that the SDGs necessitate? What is the role of research – in particular research that is rooted within the social sciences but extends to incorporate other disciplinary and practice-based inputs – in these transformations?
This book tries to address these questions. The research detailed in this volume (which took place pre-Covid-19) engages with the specificities of different contexts around the world, while seeking general lessons that can be drawn about transformations to sustainability and the role of research within them. It thus documents a new approach (or approaches) that contribute to the enterprise of “transdisciplinary” research, in which collaborations between academic and non-academic partners attempt not only to understand the world and diagnose systemic challenges of sustainability, but also to contribute to overcoming them.
The next section of this chapter firstly outlines the rationale and emergence of the ‘Pathways’ Transformative Knowledge Network, from which the co-authors are drawn, and highlights the sustainable development challenges with which it engaged between 2014 and 2020. In the following section, we point to some of the theoretical concepts and transdisciplinary approaches that the network applied across and beyond traditional schools of social and natural science. These provided a basis for significant cross-learning between the network hubs – a key objective of the network. We next explore the role that research and researchers can play in contributing to transformations to sustainability, posing questions that will be answered in the next nine chapters of this volume. Each of these sections directs the reader to the most relevant chapters, in which the issues are discussed in much greater detail. Acknowledging the multiple potential audiences to the volume (open access online), we lastly summarise the organisation of this book and provide a roadmap to its use.
Introducing the ‘Pathways’ network
This book draws upon a five-year period of transdisciplinary research that has involved over a hundred researchers across five continents in the ‘Pathways’ transformative knowledge network (TKN). The background and configuration of the TKN and the approaches to organising its work over the five years in question are detailed in Chapter 2. Emerging out of a set of collaborations involving the following organisations and the STEPS Centre (a collaboration between SPRU – the Science Policy Research Unit and the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex), the network was established to undertake cutting edge, independent, critical, engaged research, to offer a common facility for communication, impact and engagement with action and policy and to create a joint platform for learning and exchange between members, including faculty, students. Through the generous support of the ‘Transformations to Sustainability’ programme, the network was able to experiment with these and other activities in a network that spanned various regions across the globe.