How Collectives Drive Deliberate Transformation to Make Progress Toward Sustainability

Abstract

Society is on an unsustainable trajectory. The challenges of sustainability, potential solutions, and pathways toward sustainability are well-documented. However, progress is not happening to the degree necessary to achieve sustainability. As a result, transformational change that fundamentally alters the structure of social-ecological systems will occur. While some of these transformations will be forced, meaning people will need to respond to overwhelming ecological change, society has the opportunity to pursue deliberate transformations that bring about more desirable, sustainable futures. A better understanding of how to make progress toward sustainability, particularly how to bring about deliberate transformation, is needed. This study addresses the question of how collectives (large, intentionally organized groups) drive deliberate transformation toward sustainability through a qualitative study of three transformational collectives – 350.org, Arizona State University, and the Natural Capital Project. Key leaders from each case were interviewed. Analysis was an iterative process of text analysis, based on repeated readings of and reflection about interview data, key documents, and scholarly literature. The collectives drive transformation toward sustainability by identifying and articulating ideas of what is necessary for sustainability, using science as a key tool in doing so. They build and reshape power to drive these ideas into mainstream discourse and practice. Building this power involves coupling a top-down focus on purpose and bottom-up vitality of many people driving change that results in collective leadership. After finding initial success, the collectives do this by (a) employing narratives that relentlessly focus on a transformational idea as purpose, supported by a small set of strategies, and pursued through widely-varied tactics, and (b) fostering leadership that plays out through three key roles in which visionaries maintain focus on purpose, change agents manifest this purpose in practice, and facilitators play coupling roles. These collectives are agile at using internal networks to hold the collective together around purpose and at engaging in external networks with clarity about roles and purposes. Given the complexity and incumbent power structures in social-ecological systems, a collective does not control transformation. However, by driving transformational ideas into the mainstream collectives provide essential inputs into the deliberate transformations needed to achieve sustainability.