A growing body of research is calling for radical transformation of society to avoid catastrophic levels of climate change and create a more sustainable and just future. To make this possible, climate researcher will need new approaches and methods that help envision and enable transformations. In this thesis I explore how transformative scenario studies can incorporate critical social theory to enable more reflexive and actionable results. I develop climate change scenarios for a Swedish municipality and adopt a novel combination of the Manoa method and causal layered analysis. This methodological contribution, combining the creativity of the Manoa method and critical perspective of causal layered analysis, is coupled with a transdisciplinary approach. Through collaboration with local actors, including political, private, and civil society representatives, the study maximizes the relevance of the results to the local community. Building on the area’s cultural heritage of oral storytelling, the final scenarios are developed in collaboration with local storytellers and presented back to the community as a set of short stories.  The study makes two noteworthy contributions. First, by allowing local context and culture to guide the creation and dissemination of results the study shows the power of a transdisciplinary approach. Second, by applying a critical theory lens, the study unveils how underlying assumptions limit our capacity to imagine different futures and that challenging these assumptions can increase the transformative potential of scenario research.

In a global urban context marked by increasingly unsustainable conditions, the capacity to imagine a fundamentally different future is crucial to avoid being trapped in a precarious present. The cognitive potential of critically challenging and reimagining current degraded conditions is only partly examined in the existing literature. Therefore, a question arises as to whether this process could somehow influence an individual’s understanding of environmental circumstances and the motivations for acting upon them. This study focuses on University City (Mexico) as a case study. It aimed to investigate the potential of critical futures studies (CFS), applied to human-environment interactions in public spaces, to help articulate positive futures and motivate taking action. The question: What should the future look and feel like?, let participants reframe prevailing negative narratives and envision human-environment interactions in an urban public space characterized by diversity, multifunctionality, livability, and democracy. Key findings from a series of participatory workshops revealed divergent responses to the critical futures approach in terms of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. Intrinsic motivation, the inherent desire toward taking action, either increased or was maintained at high pre-existing levels, tentatively explained by the catalytic role of the emotional contrast between current and envisioned experiences. This study also observed narrative shifts regarding intrinsic motivation toward more collective, affective, and change-oriented reasons. Conversely, extrinsic motivation, as the disposition to act based on anticipated outcomes, remained limited after the workshops, which is hypothesized to be an outcome of perceived barriers, such as institutional hierarchies, and participants' unfamiliarity with potential courses of action.  Overall, this study explores and discusses the potential of CFS methods for motivating action toward positive change and underscores the importance of contextualizing motivational factors within present realities and actionable knowledge. Leveraging these insights in participatory settings can sustain motivation, furthering progress toward a desirable and sustainable future.

How do we help students to integrate their tertiary education with their development as " wise" global citizens and professionals? The study engages with this question through exploring the use of Reflective Journals as a central and integrating strategy for learning and assessment for a socially and culturally diverse group of students in a large, compulsory, first year, one-semester Engineering unit [BNB007: Professional Studies] between 2000 and 2004. The study supports the hypothesis that Reflective Journals can be an effective strategy for improving the often-criticised poor communication skills of domestic and international students in technical fields. For many students, the process of reflection also became a means of learning about their learning. Attitude surveys administered to students pre and post the teaching intervention in the years 2000-2002 showed positive changes in anticipated directions that encouraged further research. If attitude change was occurring in BNB007, what was the nature of the change? The research showed that at a deeper, longer term and more complex level, this new self-awareness supported many students to develop the kind of futures thinking and social learning " that will be necessary to navigate the transition to sustainable futures" (Raskin et al., 2002). The study contributes to the literature and to methodology through the first complementary use of two new methodologies, Sense-Making and Causal Layered Analysis. Thirty in-depth Sense-Making based interviews, including four with staff, indicate that 'meta-reflection' and transformative learning did take place. Expressing these qualities in the discourse of internationalisation as " global portability" or even " global competence" is unsatisfactory because these popular terms do not embody the qualities graduates need to create sustainable futures. As currently used, they mainly serve a market-dominated version of globalisation and its allied internationalisation-as-profit discourse. Raskin et al proposed a more appropriate term, " sustainability professionals", emerging from a preferred, valuesbased globalisation inspired by a vision of humane, sustainable futures that see " rights assured, nature treasured, culture rich and the human spirit animate" (p.70). This more challenging concept of a graduate for the 21st century is expressed here through the term Globo sapiens, whose qualities are identified in this study. Such professionals are willing to think critically and to assume responsibility for their impact on communities and the planet. This is the critical-futures oriented, transformative and therefore radical notion connoted by the title Towards Globo sapiens. This research identified some of the terrain and challenges of a post-development vision in a vocational area of teaching in Higher Education. It explained how particular students resisted or reconstructed their worlds when challenged at fundamental levels, but within a supportive atmosphere. Thus the study contributes to what educators might need to know, be and do, in order to teach effectively for the transformations urged by Sustainability Scientists, among others, and upon which any sustainable alternative futures depend. The study is underpinned by transdisciplinary syntheses that help to illuminate each area in new and fruitful ways.