Transformation Is ‘Experienced, Not Delivered’: Insights from Grounding the Discourse in Practice to Inform Policy and Theory

Abstract

Calls for transformation, transformative research, and transformational impact are increasingly heard from governments, industry, and universities to recast a course towards sustainability. This paper retraces a social, qualitative, and interpretive research endeavor to contribute to broadening the conceptual base of transformation. Drawing on perspectives of practitioners involved in working with communities to bring about change in how land and water are managed, the objective of the research was to elicit a range of practice-based encounters of transformation to inform policy and theory. In identifying precursors and processes for change, the findings bring into view the often unseen internal and experiential dimensions of transformation. As such, the research provides insights on where transformation takes place, what the first step of transformation might look like, and what might be deemed transformational. The paper also builds on social practice theory to produce an explanatory model of transformational capacity that is enabled and constrained by structures, processes, understanding, and authority that impact on social practices of knowledge generation (including science) and land and water decision-making.

Beyond “linking knowledge and action”: towards a practice-based approach to transdisciplinary sustainability interventions

“…We suggest that one way of developing complexity perspectives still further, challenging residual linear assumptions while retaining a solutions-focus, is to pay close attention to how those tasked with "linking knowledge and action" attempt to navigate the complex situations they find themselves in. This entails complementing the literature on the institutional characteristics of "knowledge-action systems" (Cash et al 2003;Muñoz-Erikson 2014;van Kerkhoff and Szlezák 2016) with approaches that begin from human experience, particularly those within the interpretive and performative social sciences, humanities and arts (Bennett and Roth 2018;Duncan et al 2018;Hulme 2018). In particular, we might ask questions such as: what are the nature of the situations that (sustainability) practitioners, researchers and policy-makers find themselves in?…”

Supporting food systems transformation: The what, why, who, where and how of mission-oriented agricultural innovation systems

“… 6 Though earlier mission-oriented programmes incorporated AIS principles such as TransForum in The Netherlands ( Fischer et al, 2012 ), and the our Land and Water Science Challenge in New Zealand ( de Jong et al, 2019 ; Duncan et al, 2018 ). …”

A Well-Being Approach to Soil Health—Insights from Aotearoa New Zealand

“…Therefore, relying solely on biochemical and physical soil health indicators disempowers collective action on soil health as some perspectives are marginalised. As Duncan et al [70] (p. 11) illustrate using water quality as an example, "conversations about how "we used to fish here, versus this is the nitrate level" (or we want to fish here or see others fish here, versus you need to get to this nitrate level) can instigate quite different conversations and actions that are likely to deliver quite different outcomes".…”

“…The soil system, as with water, has "interconnecting ecological, social, cultural, economic, historical, institutional and political dimensions" [70] (p. 11). Reframing soil health to how it is enacted and experienced would better accommodate these various dimensions and improve the management and sustainable use of soil [45].…”