Radical Transformations: What are they and how to achieve them? Lessons from Socio-ecological Transitions research.

About:

The Pathways Forum is a bi-monthly online event where researchers from diverse disciplines who engage, or want to engage, with societal actors in processes of adaptive learning to design, implement, and evaluate pathways to sustainability get a chance to reflect on concepts and theories of change, and discuss the practical implications of sustainability science and transdisciplinarity for research practices. Through this webinar series, the Pathways Initiative aims to develop and support agenda-setting, synthesis and capacity building around pathways for sustainability.

Program:

We are facing unprecedented environmental challenges rooted in unsustainable economic models, production systems, and human activities that transgress planetary boundaries. Mainstream solutions to these challenges, including within research, have often focused on technology development and adoption. However, technocentric approaches to transformation are receiving increasing criticism as modern societies are falling short of their environmental and social goals. There is a growing realization that meaningful and radical transformations will come from redefining how societies interact with the natural world. 

In this webinar, 3 researchers from the Pathways community will delve into how they use socio-ecological transition studies to guide and co-create meaningful transformations for better futures. 

Katharina Biely will provide us with a theoretical framework explaining how socio-ecological systems studies can be useful to analyze and understand real-world transformations. Then, Silja Zimmerman and Paul Cukierman will show how they use this framework to guide and facilitate radical transformations in different contexts, including local Indigenous food systems (Silja Zimmerman) and daily practices in Global North metropolitan areas (Paul Cukierman).

Speakers

Katharina Biely has an interdisciplinary background and studies sustainability transformations with a focus on socio-ecological systems.

Paul Cukierman is a PhD candidate in social geography at Université Paris Cité. He studies the diffusion of low-carbon lifestyles in France, with a particular interest in territorial catalysts for the transformation of attitudes and practices of the middle and upper classes.

Silja Zimmerman is a PhD candidate at Utrecht University. She studies sustainability transformations in food systems and in her PhD research she particularly focuses on the identification of leverage points in the marine-based Arctic Indigenous food system on St. Paul Island in the Bering Sea.

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