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.

Higher education institutions play a crucial role in fostering innovation, research, and knowledge transfer that directly impact the attainment of the SDGs. Postgraduate education, in particular, provides a unique opportunity to train and equip the next generation of leaders, researchers, and professionals with the necessary skills, knowledge, and interdisciplinary perspectives required to address complex global challenges. The concept of the resource nexus emphasizes the interconnectedness of different resources (e.g., water, energy, food, materials) and the importance of adopting a holistic approach to sustainable development. By promoting collaborations and partnerships between the Global South and North, we can facilitate knowledge exchange, capacity building, mutual learning and technology transfer, thus creating a positive ripple effect across regions and addressing common sustainability challenges.:Background & Rationale Recommendadions Strengthening Postgraduate Education for Sustainable Development Scaling Up Resource Nexus Research for Sustainability Transformations Empowering Change Agents South-North Collaboration and People-to-People Exchanges International Cooperation for Sustainability in Education Promoting Multifaceted Approaches to Sustainability Youth Empowerment for the 2030 Agenda Leveraging Digital Platforms for Education Conclusion

A revolution is brewing within global biodiversity governance as attempts to govern and to deal with biodiversity loss have not led to any substantial results. The underlying drivers of biodiversity loss keep adding to the total ecological predicament which in turn sets in motion an epistemological paradigm shift (episteme) with a call for transformative change. This shift of episteme confronts Western modern ways of thinking and challenges to leave bifurcated views of Nature behind. This leads to a shift in the great conservation debate towards a new Anthropocene conservation debate, where new discursive positions arise stressing to move beyond nature-culture dichotomies and beyond capitalism. These positions challenge the reformist and prosaic mainstream conservation regime of the Convention of Biological Diversity (CBD) with its tendency for rational problem-solving and incremental adjustments.  Contemporary process philosophers are now also creating their own discursive niche position within academia as “Earth bound”. This study draws from this position to shed a different light on the new Anthropocene conservation debate. It outlines how a “dogmatic image of thought” and how “the fallacy of the bifurcation of Nature” have created the conditions for the underlying drivers of biodiversity loss maintaining the mainstream conservation regime. “Living in harmony with nature” and “bending the curve of biodiversity loss” prove to be useful synergetic epistemic notions to break out of the dogmatic image and to leave bifurcation behind. Process-relational thinking can help understand how transition governance can support new policies that aim to create cross-scale alignments for local action within international negotiations.  Therefore, this study proposes a renewed process-inspired transition governance, which could help to find capacities that have yet remained unexercised. Based on speculative methods creating social-ecological imaginaries, these capacities can be discovered but this requires the global conservation community to see beyond the dogmatic image and bifurcation in the journey to living in harmony with nature in 2050, for which the epistemic notions of “living in harmony with nature” and “bending the curve of biodiversity loss” could turn out to be useful synergetic starting points.

The global challenges of our time are unprecedented and urgent action is needed. Transformational learning and leadership development are key leverage points for supporting society’s transition towards sustainability. Many even claim that learning on an individual, organisational and societal scale is required for society’s successful transitioning towards sustainability. However, in this relatively new field, practitioners, scholars and educators grapple with what best promotes transformational learning and with how to best design and operate learning experiences that truly build capacity for leadership for sustainability. The aim of this work was to establish an improved understanding of this and to find recommendations for practitioners and educators with ambitions to create systems change for sustainability by building the capacity of people to be sustainability leaders. As an educator and facilitator of sustainability work for over a decade, working at the crossroads of local government and community change, lecturing on leadership for sustainability in Australia and currently being embedded within the faculty of the Master’s in Strategic Leadership towards Sustainability (MSLS) program in Sweden, I have rested this thesis firmly within an action-oriented transformations research paradigm in which the only way to understand a system is through a comprehensive collaborative attempt to change it. One case of action research explored an organisational change for sustainability program that spanned over five years in a local government in Perth, Western Australia and the learning and policy interventions that supported this change. Participant observation with field notes, interviews, surveys and document analysis were particular methods used in this case. Two further cases focused on the MSLS program and its practices and specific components that support such leadership development and transformational learning. Feedback surveys from students and an open question survey to alumni were key methods used in these cases. The findings suggest that community and relationships are essential for supporting and growing sustainability leadership capacity; that hope and agency are irreplaceable components for leading sustainability change; that self-reflection and dialogue are skills that will help sustainability leaders navigate complex and uncertain futures and that these can be learned. Findings also indicate that creating a shared language for sustainability work helps bridge disciplinary divides and practitioner silos, and that skills of dialogue are required to capitalise on participation. Also, the integration of the components of community, place, content, pedagogy and disorientation with hope and agency can help support transformation in sustainability leadership education and provide synergistic reinforcement of the sustainability transformation required. This thesis provides added evidence that learning can be a key leverage point for sustainability transformations in an organisation and suggests how such learning can be most effectively achieved through a conscious design of learning environments, including the use and integration of the mentioned components to improve sustainability leadership for impact in society.