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Continued unsustainability and surpassed planetary boundaries require not only scientific and technological advances, but deep and enduring social and cultural changes. The purpose of this article is to contribute a theoretical approach to understand conditions and constraints for societal change towards sustainable development. In order to break with unsustainable norms, habits, practices, and structures, there is a need for learning for transformation, not only adaption. Based on a critical literature review within the field of learning for sustainable development, our approach is a development of the concept of transformative learning, by integrating three additional dimensions—Institutional Structures, Social Practices, and Conflict Perspectives. This approach acknowledges conflicts on macro, meso, and micro levels, as well as structural and cultural constraints. It contends that transformative learning is processual, interactional, long-term, and cumbersome. It takes place within existing institutions and social practices, while also transcending them. The article adopts an interdisciplinary social science perspective that acknowledges the importance of transformative learning in order for communities, organizations, and individuals to be able to deal with global sustainability problems, acknowledging the societal and personal conflicts involved in such transformation.

Acknowledging no political or administrative borders, the emission of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases (GHG) has to be handled on different scales through multilevel governance. The Kyoto Protocol and subsequent international agreements constitute a general framework of commitment for the signing states. National policies based on this agreement are crucial in terms of enacting legally binding codes with regard to energy, transport, and other relevant sectors. However, an adequate response to climate change must also include innovative action taken by governments, private companies, voluntary organizations, and individuals at the regional and local levels of society. Representing sites of high consumption of energy and high production of waste, towns and cities are crucial study objects when it comes to mitigating climate change (Betsill and Bulkeley, 2007; Low et al, 2000). The control of local authorities over these processes varies with national circumstances but may include energy supply and management, transport supply and demand, land-use planning, building requirements, waste management, and advice to the local community. Local authorities cannot undertake these activities in isolation. Rather, the capacity to address GHG emissions within cities is shaped through public and private actors, and through different levels of governance. Thus, across the world many cities have developed initiatives to reduce emissions of GHGs, either on their own or as members of city networks. Although the exploding worldwide worries about climate change in the last few years have mainly triggered research on national and global scales, there has also been a growing research interest in urban initiatives and programmes to address climate change, their progress, and the problems they have encountered (see, for example,

Two surface plasmon resonance (SPR)-based biosensor assays for detection of beta-lactam antibiotics in milk are reported. The assays are based on the enzymatic activity of a carboxypeptidase converting a 3-peptide into a 2-peptide, a reaction that is inhibited in the presence of beta-lactams. Antibodies were used to measure either the amount of formed enzymatic product or the amount of remaining enzymatic substrate. Both assays detected different beta-lactams at or below European maximum residue limits (MRLs), and the detection limit for penicillin G was 1.2 microg/kg and 1.5 microg/kg for the 2- and 3-peptide assays, respectively. The precision (CV) was < 5%, both within and between assays at the penicillin G MRL (4 microg/kg). The biosensor results obtained upon analysis of incurred milk samples were compared with results obtained by liquid chromatography (HPLC), and the method agreements were, in general, good.

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