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About
TransMod is a 5 year project funded by an advanced grant of the European Research Council (ERC). The project aims to enhance understanding and build theories of sustainability transformation by learning from both past and ongoing processes of transformative change in the context of natural resource governance and food systems across the Global South and North.
TransMod focuses on how novel ideas and practices emerge and become established in response to crises, and interact, or even compete, with existing and deeply entrenched ways of doing things. It aims to investigating not the goals or means of transformation, but the ways in which transformations unfold (or not) and what enables or hinders transformative change. We focus on at least two aspects of transformative change processes: 1) the role of multiple, often protracted crises and whether they are transformative or rather reinforce the status-quo, and 2) the emergence of attractors, such as new narratives, norms, visions, that can help the new practices stabilize over time.
The project brings two theoretical perspectives into dialogue: complex adaptive systems and process relational, in order to deepen our understanding of transformative change and facilitate new ways of thinking about and with change. We will pursue the project’s objectives through a multi-method approach that combines conceptual and empirical work using qualitative methods, arts-based methods and simulation modelling in iterative and reflective processes. We aim to theorize transformative change through i) studying past transformative change, e.g. of marine governance in Chile, ii) investigate ongoing change of environmental governance in the context of rights of nature in Europe, and iii) co-produce knowledge about transformative change in food systems in Sweden and South Africa. The latter aims to develop a mode of practice-based theorizing where understanding is generated while addressing real-world problems. Together, these activities will serve the development of complexity-aware theories of transformation that are useful for action.
