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Barry Ness

Barry Ness

Senior Lecturer, Docent

Barry Ness

Building capacity for sustainability transformations through transdisciplinary experimentation : Empirical evidence from a novel methodology deployed in 7 countries

Author

  • Sarah Burch
  • Jose DiBella
  • Megan Farrelly
  • Daniel Lang
  • Kes Mccormick
  • Barry Ness
  • Christopher J. Orr
  • Arnim Wiek

Summary, in English

In 2022, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) established that global greenhouse gas emissions trajectories are not on track to limiting warming to less than 2 ° C above pre-industrial averages (IPCC 2022a). Given that broader progress towards ambitious climate change and sustainability goals remains incremental, a whole-of-society approach, including transformative innovation in the private sector, is required to trigger the necessary changes within deeply unsustainable social and technical systems. This paper develops and illustrates an evidence-based process to enable organizations to foster sustainability transformations beyond a firm’s traditional boundaries. Based on 42 rich qualitative cases studies, a range of transdisciplinary capacity-building events in 7 countries, and 13 co-produced experiments, we develop the logic behind, and empirically test, an iterative process that maps the sustainability pathways of small firms, builds capacity for transformations among them, triggers new experiments, and reflects upon how these actions can and are influencing broader transformations towards sustainability. We find that small businesses have the potential to facilitate sustainability transformations, both within their organizational boundaries, and within the broader ecosystem of which they are a part. We find that transformative sustainability practices are relational (in that they rely on a web of relationships among many ‘ecosystem’ actors rather than a single organization) and may be fundamentally altered by transdisciplinary co-production methodologies. Ultimately, we found an iterative relationship between capacity and experimentation: capacity was built through experimentation, which then revealed potential capacity gaps or needs that could be remedied through iteration.

Department/s

  • LUCSUS (Lund University Centre for Sustainability Studies)
  • CIRCLE
  • Centre for Healthy Indoor Environments

Publishing year

2026

Language

English

Publication/Series

Environmental Science and Policy

Volume

179

Document type

Journal article

Publisher

Elsevier

Topic

  • Environmental Studies in Social Sciences

Status

Published

ISBN/ISSN/Other

  • ISSN: 1462-9011