LEVER

How can sustainability science support society in dealing with today’s global crises? Sustainability science seeks both to analytically understand sustainability problems, and to design interventions that can contribute solution-options to these problems. However, knowledge about how to intervene in order to reach a desirable vision is typically missing. Especially how to deliberately engage with values as places of intervention (leverage points), remains a critical knowledge gap. LEVER aims to critically develop a transformative theory and practice to support the (co-)production of transformation knowledge, with a special focus on knowledge necessary to investigate and unleash values as leverage points for sustainability transformation.

LEVER conceives of theory and methods of transformative sustainability science as the theory and methods necessary to produce transformation knowledge. It conceptualizes transformation knowledge as knowledge about where to intervene (leverage points) and how to intervene (levers, pathways), with an assumption that transformative science plays a reflexive role in who intervenes. LEVER hypothesizes that the methods of traditional analytical frameworks considering change and values are not enough to engage with sustainability transformation. It assumes that new transformative methods are necessary to generate transformation knowledge.