25: Driving sustainability transformation through transformative research: new avenues for knowledge and action (Gudrun Haindlmaier, Matthias Weber, Petra Wagner, Stephanie Daimer, Valerie Voggenreiter, Felix Beyers)
This track invites scholars and practitioners of STI policy and research for a better world with an explicit interest in transformative research. Transformative Research focuses on understanding real-world problems of unsustainability and on developing knowledge and action to solve them. It builds on the acknowledgement that real-world problems are persistent, complex, ambiguous and require fundamental societal change (transformations) to be overcome. This research stream takes an explicitly interventionist approach, aiming to catalyze societal change processes by contributing system, target, transformation, and process knowledge in various forms. It explicitly builds upon the need for interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary collaborations by engaging with diverse societal actors in a co-creative research setting, including for example reflections on ethical aspects and considering the impact on and involvement of (marginalized) communities and their wisdom and knowledge.
This track first creates an interactive paper session on how to include or exclude diverse types of knowledge (e.g. social, legal, cultural, ecological, economic and others) within transformation processes. It calls for papers and contributions to generate discussions on what it means to engage diverse stakeholders, leading cooperation, and supporting transformation-oriented activities, which can open up new avenues for knowing, acting, and reflecting. By acknowledging different perspectives on knowledge, allowing for alternative problem definitions, and new types of legitimate methods and solutions, Transformative Research helps to better understand and shape the directionality of transformations as wells as to make explicit researchers’ and practitioners’ legitimacy. This leads to the question of who has a stake in the transformation and who has a voice to decide. What types of actors are capable of being included and “heard” within Transformative Research; what type of knowledge is excluded and for what reasons? Is it the “usual suspects“ that have a say or is it truly open to new actors and their knowledge systems and values?
In a second step, this track creates space for a policy &practice dialogue on the role of STI practitioners in Transformative Research practices. As this new form of science aims to transcend traditional understandings and roles of research, it aims to engage with practitioners on what roles, activities and ultimately purposes practitioners see as relevant to transformative research approaches by incorporating their values and worldviews. Transformative research brings together different “languages“ which are linked to various (implicit and explicit) roles, norms and aims. Therefore, this track aims to create such space where we can start a conversation on how Transformative Research may promote research actions and outputs that help to design, deliver, and monitor a socially just and inclusive (green) transition. It asks, how do we ensure procedural, epistemic, and distributional justice – within the research process itself, but also in terms of selection (bias), problem definition and policy implementation/communication?
Finally, using an interactive and digital whiteboard (miro), this track provides an opportunity to link the two sections on knowledge and action proposed above to reflect on the larger meaning and lessons learnt from discussions on how transformative research can drive sustainability transformation.
Keywords: transformative research, inclusion & exclusion of knowledge, transdicisplinarity, legitimacy, policy-practice-dialogue