2024 in Sustainabilty Science

Scholars and practitioners are urgently highlighting the need to apply a relational approach to effectively address societal crises. At the same time, little is known about the associated challenges, and there is little advice regarding how to operationalize this approach in sustainability science. Against this background, this article explores how we can break out of our current paradigms and approaches, and instead apply relational thinking, being, and acting in the way we conduct research. To achieve this, we systematically list all major research phases, and assess possible pathways for integrating a relational paradigm for each step. We show that moving toward a relational paradigm requires us to methodically question and redefine existing theories of change, concepts, and approaches, for instance by combining abductive reasoning, first-person inquiries, and decentering the human through critical complexity theory. Challenging mainstream thought, and daring to ask different questions in each step is crucial to ultimately shift scientific norms and systems. Hence, we offer a catalog of questions that may help to systematically integrate relational being, thinking, and acting into the process, as a tool for transforming current paradigms in research, and associated education and practice. Finally, we highlight the importance of further research to develop and refine our outcomes.

2023

To respond to the challenges of the Anthropocene, scholars from various disciplines increasingly emphasize that a mere outer transformation is insufficient and that we also need an inner transformation that addresses deep leverage points. Yet, the open questions are how the inner and outer dimensions relate to each other and how inner transformation might lead to outer transformation. How we attempt to answer these questions is determined by our dominant paradigm. Paradigms define how we understand and shape the world, and thus, they define how we conceptualize challenges, such as inner and outer transformation. Various authors argue that the dominant paradigm, which is characterized by reductionism, empiricism, dualism, and determinism, might be a root cause for insufficiently addressing sustainability challenges. As an alternative, many argue for a relational paradigm, which understands complex phenomena in terms of constitutive processes and relations. A relational paradigm might offer possibilities to reconceptualize inner and outer transformation in the Anthropocene and might shed new light on how to integrate both in sustainability science. Yet, it is still being determined how a relational paradigm can contribute to the understanding of inner and outer transformations towards sustainability in the Anthropocene. Therefore, this dissertation's overarching scope is to contribute to systems change towards a more social-ecological future by generating insights into and exploring possibilities of a relational paradigm for inner and outer transformation in the Anthropocene. This thesis is divided into three sub-questions. The first research question aims to increase the theoretical understanding of a relational paradigm. The second research question aims to develop a transformative educational case study grounded in a relational, justice-oriented approach. The third research question aims to analyze how a relational paradigm might contribute to policies and practices for sustainable lifestyles. The results indicate that inner and outer transformation in the Anthropocene can be reconceptualized as paradigm-ing relationality in the Ecocene. "Paradigm-ing" as an active verb, reconceptualizes inner and outer transformation into ontologies, epistemologies, ethics, and socialecological realities that are ongoing, nonhierarchical, nonlinear, dynamic, co-creative processes of intra-action. The Ecocene decenters the human and attends to what we might be able to intra-actand become-with. These insights can offer unexplored perspectives to address sustainability challenges and increase our capacities to respond in novel ways.

2022 in Sustainability Science

The concept of sustainable lifestyles is said to have reached the limits of its usefulness. As commonly understood, it impedes an effective response to our increasingly complex world, and the associated societal challenges. In this context, the emerging paradigm of relationality might offer a way forward to renew our current understanding and approach. We explore this possibility in this study. First, we systematize if, and how, the current dominant social paradigm represents a barrier to sustainable lifestyles. Second, we analyze how a relational approach could help to overcome these barriers. On the basis of our findings, we develop a Relational Lifestyle Framework (RLF). Our aim is to advance the current knowledge by illustrating how sustainable lifestyles are a manifestation of identified patterns of thinking, being, and acting that are embedded in today’s “socioecological” realities. The RLF revitalizes the field of sustainable lifestyle change, as it offers a new understanding for further reflection, and provides new directions for policy and transformation research.

2020 in International Journal of Sustainability in Higher Education

Purpose

This paper aims to increase related knowledge across personal, social and ecological dimensions of sustainability and how it can be applied to support transformative learning.

Design/methodology/approach

The paper provides a reflexive case study of the design, content and impact of a course on eco-justice that integrates relational learning with an equity and justice lens. The reflexive case study provides a critical, exploratory self-assessment, including interviews, group discussions and surveys with key stakeholders and course participants.

Findings

The results show how relational approaches can support transformative learning for sustainability and provide concrete practices, pathways and recommendations for curricula development that other universities/training institutions could follow or learn from.

Originality/value

Sustainability research, practice and education generally focuses on structural or systemic factors of transformation (e.g. technology, governance and policy) without due consideration as to how institutions and systems are shaping and shaped by the transformation of personal agency and subjectivity. This presents a vast untapped and under-studied potential for addressing deep leverage points for change by using a relational approach to link personal, societal and ecological transformations for sustainability.

2020 in Ambio

Relational thinking has recently gained increasing prominence across academic disciplines in an attempt to understand complex phenomena in terms of constitutive processes and relations. Interdisciplinary fields of study, such as science and technology studies (STS), the environmental humanities, and the posthumanities, for example, have started to reformulate academic understanding of nature-cultures based on relational thinking. Although the sustainability crisis serves as a contemporary backdrop and in fact calls for such innovative forms of interdisciplinary scholarship, the field of sustainability research has not yet tapped into the rich possibilities offered by relational thinking. Against this background, the purpose of this paper is to identify relational approaches to ontology, epistemology, and ethics which are relevant to sustainability research. More specifically, we analyze how relational approaches have been understood and conceptualized across a broad range of disciplines and contexts relevant to sustainability to identify and harness connections and contributions for future sustainability-related work. Our results highlight common themes and patterns across relational approaches, helping to identify and characterize a relational paradigm within sustainability research. On this basis, we conclude with a call to action for sustainability researchers to co-develop a research agenda for advancing this relational paradigm within sustainability research, practice, and education.