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This article is taken from 'Transforming the planet: Our vision for the future of environmental science', which sets out a vision for the role of environmental science in facilitating the transition to a sustainable society.
Throughout the IES’s Future of ES23 horizon scanning and foresight project, the urgent need for transformative change was evident. ‘Transforming the planet’ identifies how to make that change real by co-creating a sustainable society where people and nature thrive.
Read our full vision in Transforming the planet.
When talking about the future, metaphors come all too easily. The butterfly is a popular one: the transformation from one thing into another captures all the possibility associated with a world remade in a more beautiful image.
However, an understanding of complex systems reveals that such a simple approach to transformation is inaccurate. Social, economic, and environmental systems are entangled in feedback loops, subtle drivers, and holistic pressures over time, making them resilient to some changes and wildly susceptible to others. The result is that changes often lead to policy failures or unintended consequences. To address the complexity of systems, transformative change approaches are needed, utilising key leverage points to manipulate whole systems.
In that context, it is not the metamorphosis of the butterfly humanity should be seeking, but the emergence of the dragonfly. When a nymph transforms into a dragonfly, many subtle pressures come together to create a new creature beneath the surface of the nymph’s skin. Once that unseen change has begun, the nymph moults, shedding away its past appearance as it adopts a new form. Often, more than a single moult is needed as the creature grows into what it needs to become. Nonetheless, at the end of the journey, the world bears witness to a full transformation: the emergence of the dragonfly.
Through that lens, much can be learnt about the requirements of transformative change. ‘Transition’ is not as simple as putting society’s hopes into a cocoon and expecting them to emerge flawlessly on the other side. Systems inhere against change, so it is necessary to work with their key drivers, making those subtle transformations beneath the surface until the whole system emerges transformed. Just as the emergence of the dragonfly is only possible under the right circumstances, enabling conditions must be met to facilitate transformative change. And much as the nymph must moult many times, so too does transformative change require iteration and reflection in order to be fully realised.
Transformative change is a necessary element of meeting society’s hopes to transition away from the unsustainable pressures which drive environmental challenges. Achieving it will not be easy; it requires novel thinking and a strong understanding of the systems people work and live within. Fundamentally, the core questions will be: who will drive transformative change, what systems and frameworks will underpin it, and how can that transformative change be delivered?
People and perspectives: Who will drive transformative change?
People are at the heart of transformative change, not only because they are key operating agents whose actions embed feedback loops and routines into systems, but because transformative change exists for human benefit. The principle at the heart of transformation is the creation of a particular vision of the world, where society embraces rather than consumes the environment, using transformative change to reach that goal.
Values and world views are two of the most fundamental drivers of social systems. If the natural world is viewed as an economic resource or a wilderness to be tamed, society is unlikely to align its ambitions with environmental conservation and improvement, so many seemingly independent pressures will continue to arise. Conversely, if people recognise nature’s fundamental role in underpinning the ecosystem services society relies on, it is more likely that those considerations will be recognised as decisions are made, mitigating the impact of many small decisions which add up to an unsustainable society.
For individual actions to help guide transformative change, everyone must be working towards the same vision of the future. Co-creation approaches, carbon literacy, and community collaboration tools like citizen assemblies are critical ways to unite society, but they need to be scaled up to make the most of their potential.
When society has collaboratively created a vision of the future, science and policy will be empowered to design the mechanisms which will bring about that future, aided by robust monitoring and effective policy delivery.
Systems and frameworks: What will drive transformative change?
Going beyond the role of participants in social and policy systems, those systems themselves will be critical to driving any kind of transition away from a world of environmental crises, making use of the key leverage points necessary to achieve transformative change.
Given the prolific role played by the global economy in shaping policy decisions and the actions of individuals, economic leverage points have a special power in driving or subverting environmental degradation. Embedding circular economy principles and sustainability throughout corporate value chains will be crucial to addressing the unsustainable pressures linked to global economic growth, because those principles provide the means to increase the efficiency of resource use without losing value or compromising on the quality of the environment.
Both in economics and in the broader environmental space, effective policy depends on the ability to unite different spatial scales and carry decisions through to delivery. Where different environmental strategies, regulations, and policies operate at specific scales or contexts, frameworks must bring them together to ensure coherence and to prevent issues falling into gaps between policies.
Uniting policies through framework-level governance allows for targeted policies which address the key leverage points necessary to transform systems, while also respecting the interactions between those drivers and ensuring a systems approach to solutions.
Not only can framework-level governance prevent gaps in policy, it can support the effective delivery of policy. Embedding post-implementation reviews and iterative monitoring of implementation allows these tools to be tested and fine-tuned until the governance system as a whole has been transformed.
Leveraging policy and practice: How will we drive transformative change?
To achieve transformative change in practice, it won’t be enough for people to want change and to recognise the systems which can make it a possibility. Key leverage points must be actively targeted with effective interventions, linking the policy scale with robust monitoring and implementation, driven by the relationships between scientific evidence, policy makers, industry, research institutes, and the public.
In doing so, the social and economic instincts which drive individual and collective action will be vitally important, so the insights of social sciences like behavioural economics and sociology are fundamental. At the same time, environmental science can support the appropriate application of technological advances to facilitate change. Only by drawing together these technological, economic, and social factors with knowledge and evidence from environmental science can meaningful transformative change be achieved, manipulating the drivers in complex systems, rather than succumbing to them.
For this kind of approach to be successful, it would be vital to ensure that any citizen input is legitimate and represents the views of the community, so social and economic transformation would be necessary. Real-time monitoring and Artificial Intelligence would need assured reliability and consistent delivery, so technological transformation would be necessary. Finally, policy processes and regulation would need to be able to keep pace with real-time changes in the environment, so regulatory transformation would be necessary.
What the future holds: is transformative change still achievable?
In the face of dynamic social, economic, and natural systems which push back against attempts to change them, it can feel that uncertainty is overwhelming and that there is not much agency to shape the future. However, much like the dragonfly, many small, coordinated and well-managed changes beneath the surface can come together to transform the world.
The world is not yet aligned with transformative approaches to environmental crises, but such approaches are still achievable. The critical factors which will determine which future humanity faces will be how well people work collaboratively to build a shared social vision of the future and how quickly they embrace the path to that future through transformative change.
Once humanity knows what it wants to achieve and makes the necessary preparations, society will be ready to take flight through transformative change, carried on the wings of the dragonfly.
Header image credit: © PhotoArt via Adobe Stock
