Abstract
Despite growing global attention to the 2015 UN Sustainable Development Goals, we have made limited progress towards achieving them. This article describes an emerging Transformative Learning Journey for Sustainability Leadership being developed for professionals at the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland. The purpose is to help participants achieve the individual transformations needed to enact sustainability-focused interventions in their communities and organizations. From a socio-material lens, we describe four phases of the emerging Learning Journey and identify how they are transformative. The Learning Journey includes spending time in nature, growing an understanding of climate justice, collaborating, and planning action. We draw on reflective data from participants, linking them to Hoggan’s (2016a) transformative learning outcomes and other relevant studies, the goal being to contribute to the world’s collective knowledge of
In 2015, the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) were introduced as a global attempt to make progress on challenges such as poverty, inequality, and climate change. Attention to sustainability, particularly the climate crisis, intensified with the Paris Agreement in 2016. It continued with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Special Report on Global Warming (IPCC, 2018). Since then, organizations across sectors have increasingly focused on developing strategies to address the complex challenges encompassed by the SDGs. Regardless, globally we have made limited progress. In fact, on many indicators our performance has worsened.
The challenges the SDGs (2024) address are cross-sector, systemic, and impact all levels of our global societies. Professionals across sectors have struggled to work together towards effective transformative strategies in an uncertain environment. Addressing this knowledge and skills gap requires professional development that enables practitioners to collaboratively define challenges based on a deep understanding of systemic problems, explore and experiment with solutions that benefit diverse stakeholders, and clarify shared goals to spur action.
In its recommendations for sustainability competences, the European Commission, Joint Research Centre (2022) identified “embodying sustainability values, embracing complexity, envisioning sustainable futures, and acting for sustainability” (GreenComp, 2022) as the key pillars essential for individual capacity building to making progress on sustainability challenges. Building the capacity to deal with complexity, uncertainty, and adversity requires sustainability education to go beyond providing hard and current knowledge on sustainability (Bansal & DesJardine, 2014). Aware of the challenges of achieving the learning objectives for the SDGs, UNESCO (2017) describes “an action-oriented transformative pedagogy that engages learners in participative, systemic, creative and innovative thinking and acting processes in the context of local communities and learners’ daily lives” (p. 1). Building on this, the question becomes, how do we develop learners’ capacities to enact these competences? What skills do we need to develop at the level of the individual to achieve ambitious sustainability goals in a short timeframe?
Inspired by insufficient progress on the SDGs, the Inner Development Goals (IDGs) initiative (2020) launched an interdisciplinary and open-source global collaboration across academia and practice, the reason being that “we lack the inner capacity to deal with our increasingly complex environment and challenges” (p. 2) and thereby to make progress on the SDGs. The IDGs propose a set of “transformational” skills needed “in order to successfully work with complex societal issues, in particular those identified in UN’s Agenda 2030 (United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs: Sustainable Development, 2015, United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Sustainable Development, 2024) and the 17 Sustainable Development Goals” (Thomas, 2021, p. 2).
While both the SDGs and the IDGs view the changes needed as transformative,
Thus, the purpose of this article is to describe four elements of this emerging Transformative Learning Journey for sustainability leadership and identify the ways in which they are transformative. Our intention is to help build a collective knowledge base of
Method
Theoretical Perspective
The Learning Journey draws on two theoretical perspectives, socio-materialism and transformative learning, and integrates the Journey with the Inner Developmental Goals. A socio-material perspective reconceptualizes the social as part of rather than separate from nature; the natural and human world are entangled (Barad, 2007). Agency is not owned by persons or by things but is an intra-action among them that reconfigures their entanglements. In Barad’s words, “To be entangled is not simply to be intertwined with another, as in the joining of separate entities, but to lack an independent, self-contained existence. Existence is not an individual affair. Individuals do not preexist their interactions; rather, individuals emerge through and as part of their entangled intra-relating” (Barad, 2007, p. ix). In this view, agency is not the acting
Others have also looked at sustainability education and transformative learning through the lens of socio-material theory (Lange, 2004, 2009, 2018; O’Neil, 2018; Rodríguez Aboytes & Barth, 2020; Selby, 2002; Walsh et al., 2020) and seen this relational ontology as an important way of re-understanding transformative learning considering the world’s sustainability challenges. Lange (2018) refers specifically to Barad’s work in calling this a relational shift, noting that others have moved toward a relational view in understanding transformative learning theory. She goes on to write, In a relational ontology, transformative learning, and sustainability education would attend to the dynamics of the whole, and nested systems as much as possible…It would address as much of the relational network as possible—geographic place and other nonhuman relations in that place, the myriad of work, personal, and familial relations brought into the room by learners, and the larger cultural, social, economic, and political relations as well as cosmic mythology and spiritual relations that exist at the historical moment (p. 291).
We view transformative learning as an evolving theory, drawing on a wide variety of perspectives as the theory has changed over time (Anand et al., 2020).
Through this lens, transformative learning for sustainability addresses the intent of the Inner Developmental Goals [IDGs]. The IDG Framework has five dimensions: Being - Relationship to Self; Thinking - Cognitive Skills; Relating - Caring for Others and the World; Collaborating - Social Skills; and Acting - Enabling Change. These dimensions are further defined by “23 Skills and Qualities” (IDGs, 2020). We refer to these dimensions and italicize the skills and qualities in reporting our data analysis for the transformative learning outcomes.
Data and Analysis
Our analysis of the transformative learning outcomes from the emerging Learning Journey comes from the design and delivery of two nature immersion retreats and seven other executive development programs over three years at the University of St Gallen. The quotations included here come from takeaways, questions, and reflections participants in these programs generated, as well as an interview with faculty familiar with the Coffee Case (Brooks, R. E, 2023) in the Learning Journey, who had observed its delivery on two occasions. Informed consent was procured for all quotations used as required by the University of St Gallen Ethics Committee. Research materials related to this paper are in a saved and password-protected folder and can be accessed only by Rachel E. Brooks. The two researchers consisted of one on-site researcher, and one who collaborated with her on various aspects of program design, data analysis and theorizing the pedagogy. In analyzing this small data set, first, we used open-coding, keeping in mind a socio-material perspective on sustainability; second, we coded according to Hoggan’s outcome codes (2016a, 2016b); third, we searched for any contradictions in the data; and fourth, we analyzed according to the Inner Developmental Goals. We then reflected on our journey in offering these programs, questions we still have, and possibilities for developing the Journey.
Building “Transformational Skills” for Sustainability: Four Activities for Transformative Learning Outcomes
O’Neil (2018) defines three orders of change within sustainability education: “
To develop a Transformative Learning Journey, keeping in mind the “transformational skills” outlined in the IDGs, Rachel E. Brooks identified four potentially transformative activities from professional development programs delivered to groups across sectors: facilitated Nature Immersion (Kasap et al., 2021); a Coffee Case focused on social justice and complexity (Brooks, R. E., 2023); Design Thinking (Bakker et al., 2010; Manna et al., 2022); and Action Learning (Jiusto et al., 2013; Revans, 1982).
We discuss these four activities, making specific reference to both Hoggan’s (2016a) transformative learning outcomes and the IDGs; we italicize both in the text for clarity.
Nature Immersion
The first phase of the Journey draws from place-based education, immersing learners in nature. Since existing social structures, including those of higher and continuing education, are implicit in reproducing knowledge and power hierarchies that contribute to the current ecological and social challenges central to the climate crisis, this phase removes participants from these spaces (Gruenewald, 2003). It is also important given the modern world’s taken-for-granted understanding of the natural world as an object we act on, use as a resource, or defend ourselves against, rather than see ourselves as an intra-acting part of the natural world (Barad, 2007; Walsh et al., 2020).
In nature, participants can experience their entanglement with the natural world and make sense of this through critical reflection, alone and with others. Takahashi (2002) points to the modernistic rational dualism that conditions us to suppress the non-rational, which includes “...the sense of wonder, the sense of the sacred, emotion, intuition, the body’s ways of knowing, and life-sustaining values such as care and respect” (p. 175). He describes a realization he had when taking children into nature: “[It] made me realize that conscious engagement is sometimes required in order to awaken ourselves” (p. 176). These non-rational elements of being human, this awakening of our consciousness, are key outcomes of transformative learning (Hoggan, 2016a). Abrams (1997) describes the transformative power of a journey to another place that engages all of our senses: “The eyes, the skin, the tongue, ears, and nostrils–all are gates where our body receives the nourishment of otherness…these feathered bodies and antlers and tumbling streams–these breathing shapes are our family, the beings with whom we are engaged, with whom we struggle and suffer and celebrate” (p. 9). This also points to embodied and emotional dimensions of the transformative potential of nature immersion related to how we understand ourselves and is supported by recent research in neuroscience (Abercrombie, et al., 2023; Okon-Singer, et al., 2015; Van der Kolk, 2014).
Nature Immersion in the Journey is designed to build self-awareness, openness, and connectedness to self, others, nature, and the world. We base this on the Regenerative Leadership Programme, designed by primary facilitators Ruth Förster and Anaïs Sägesser in collaboration with Rachel Brooks and offered for the first time through the University of St Gallen in 2023. Regenerative Leadership acknowledges that “the challenges we face can seem overwhelmingly complex,” and that leaders need to step back and observe interconnections between issues and our own role within them (Regenerative Leadership, 2024). To do this, Förster and Sägesser guided participants through embodiment exercises and solo walks in nature; group dialogue, storytelling, and reflection; and self-reflection exercises such as journaling and making learning artifacts. These activities enable participants to connect to the natural world in new ways. They work on questions such as, “Where do I stand in this and what can I contribute to the sustainability transition? What are my resources? What are my greatest obstacles? What concrete methods and tools will help me on my way forward? How can I practice regenerative leadership, serving the wellbeing of myself, my team, my organization, the land and the world?” (Sägesser, & Förster, 2023).
Working on these questions while immersed in nature and interacting with others in new ways, such as through reflection and mirroring of shared and solo time in nature, can bring tangibility to the notion of entanglement. Prior to including it in her programs, Rachel E. Brooks experienced nature immersion during an outdoor weekend facilitated by Sägesser and Förster for a small group of women near Interlaken, Switzerland in 2022. She reflected, For me, it was a new experience to explore what I would do without any of my usual reasons for being outdoors in nature. I wasn’t there to run, climb, do any kind of sport. I had to define an intention, walk over a self-defined threshold (I chose a small root), and then spend two hours just following my own curiosity. It was fascinating to observe my own actions and how they made me feel. First, I went uphill into the woods. I discovered a rock I could sit on, which I did. I sat and listened to the birds, looked at the insects that wandered by, felt the moss. I was surprised by how unfamiliar it felt to look at nature in such a detailed way. Then I walked further uphill, towards a cliff. I wanted to know how high it was, whether it was climbable. I spent some time there looking at the steep, mossy rock wall and then discovered a small path leading out of the forest, into the sunlight, and into a small field. There I laid for quite a while, looking at the clouds, the mountain across the valley, and trying to fathom the beauty and intensity of the blues, greens and golds. I was quite overcome by how immense the feeling of gratitude and joy was, as it swelled in my chest.
This suggests new ways of being and connecting opened by this alone-time in nature. With enough time, without fear of judgment, and with the purpose to explore her intention, she was able to engage with nature in a playful and curious way. She found it insightful to observe her own actions and reflected on what she chose to do and how those things made her feel. This showed her the potential of nature to mirror one’s inner self, making more visible what may have been hidden.
Then she reflected on her own reflections and analyzed them through the lens of Hoggan’s (2016a, 2016b) transformative learning outcomes. For her, the experience in nature nurtured a The group reflections were also transformative for her. She wrote, To close the experience, I walked back over the threshold. Sitting in a group, each of us shared what we had experienced during these two hours of alone time, and if we chose to, how it made us feel. Then the facilitators repeated back to each of us what they had heard, “I heard the story of a person, who…”. This mirroring provided unexpected clarity. It was fascinating for me to hear what I had said from another person. It showed me the kinds of things I seem to be looking for. Hearing how my emotions seemed to shift throughout the experience, depending on where I was, what I was focused on, gave me insights on where my fears gain power and where I feel joyful. What also struck me is how wonderful and liberating it felt to connect with other people about these experiences that were so physical and emotional and hear theirs. I noticed that in my day-to-day life, there is a lot of thinking and talking about work, organization, things we do. Talking with others about doing things doesn’t activate me in the same way as listening and sharing about physical experiences, feelings, and emotions. This so quickly built a sense of trust and community among all of us in the group. It was freeing to have permission to connect with nature and with each other in this way, and it showed me myself in new ways.
These ongoing group- and self-reflections guided by the phases of taking stock, identifying resources and obstacles, solo immersion followed by harvesting and integrating, facilitated a transformative process of self-learning, while enabling her to partake in fulfilling new forms of interacting and relating with others. Sharing her experience in nature deepened and
This phase supports all five dimensions of the IDG framework. In Being, it contributes to a strong
Coffee Case Study
In this phase, participants face multiple stakeholders’ needs in tackling sustainability challenges. The Coffee Case (Brooks, 2023) focuses on a multinational food company’s effort to address sustainability in their global supply chains. The Case was based on observation and interviews with small coffee farmers in Latin America and within the multinational company over three years. Because of the interviews and observation on the farms, the Case provides a deep view into the challenges farmers and their families dealt with due to the dynamic and often low price of coffee, showing how climate change increased both costs and insecurity. Participants explore the needs and priorities of the company, farmers in the coffee supply chain, and the international non-profits, collaborating to develop a social needs assessment. They also step into the perspectives of diverse stakeholder groups, temporarily taking on the roles of the farmers, non-profits, and the multinational company. A faculty member familiar with the Case noted that one impact comes from students having… to put themselves in the shoes of different stakeholders, which not only builds empathy but means they are forced to think differently within different conditions. If I’m in the role of the farmer, my first priority is to feed my family and one bad year is a problem. If I’m in the role of the MNC, it’s a different lens, there’s pressure from the media.
The Coffee Case pushes participants to address questions of social justice and inclusion. In small groups, one group elaborates the challenges the company faced, another elaborates those faced by farmers, and a third focuses on non-profits. They then develop SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) analyses, with the different groups taking on the perspectives of farmers, the company and non-profits. For many participants, particularly those coming from a business background, working through the perspectives of farmers and non-profits was transformative. Their view of farmers shifted from seeing them as poor producers for a company, to understanding them as small business owners. It deepened their understanding of the farmers’ agency and humanity.
Next, the facilitator mixes groups so that farmers, non-profits, and the company were represented in each new small group. These groups were then asked to devise a strategy that contributed to social, environmental, and economic sustainability, while delivering on the needs of each stakeholder group. Through this exercise, participants gained an experiential understanding of the intra-relationships between social, environmental, and economic sustainability and the challenge of creating value for and meeting the needs of all people and organizations involved or impacted. Participants began to question how the business focus on economic growth impacts other areas of society and the natural world.
The exercise also helped participants question who needs to be at the table when devising cross-sector collaborations for sustainability. In the collaboration studied for the Coffee Case, farmers were not part of the company’s workshops, even though these workshops focused explicitly on improving farmers’ lives. Without farmers’ perspectives, solutions represented only the needs and assumptions of company and non-profit collaborators. The exercise invited participants to question taken-for-granted epistemologies and practices that are the status quo in many businesses and organizations. The faculty member quoted above continued, “…I remember students saying they felt pressured in a different way, they experienced (the Case) in a different way very personal to them. And if we think about learning and that we want them to learn at cognitive and emotional levels, the case contributes to that.”
Participants’ descriptions of their takeaways and reflections suggested several transformative learning outcomes. One said, “Opened my eyes on the plight of farmers around the world,” demonstrating
Participants’ questions suggested increased
In working through the business reality that coffee farmers face, their objectification as “a resource” and their absence from the meeting, participants faced the limits of their own understanding of the world. They also began to see the limits of their own life and work contexts. This links to Barad’s concept of intra-acting. Barad (2007) writes, …the ongoing practice of being open and alive to each meeting, each intra-action, so that we might use our ability to respond, our responsibility, to help awaken, to breathe life into ever new possibilities for living justly [emphasis added]. The world and its possibilities for becoming are remade in each meeting. (p. x)
In this view, agency is not the acting of subject-object dualism most participants came with, but intra-acting with. In this ethico-onto-epistemology, “Ethics is … about taking account of the entangled materializations of which we are part … even the smallest cuts matter … ” (Barad, 2012, para. 37).
The Coffee Case contributes to building capacity in all five dimensions of the IDG framework. In Thinking, it supports all five areas of
Design Thinking
In this phase, participants “dig deeper,” experiment, and collaborate. Design Thinking, a methodology for driving user-focused solutions, has also been explored in sustainability literature. It provides a clear cycle for developing solutions, including need finding, synthesis, ideation, prototyping, testing, and repeating the cycle as necessary (Beckman & Barry, 2007; Dorst, 2011; Earle & Leyva-de la Hiz, 2020; Elsbach & Stigliani, 2018). This invites participants out of usual approaches to problem-solving (Brown, 2008; Kolko, 2015). However, another body of literature discussing transitions suggests “transitions are not designed but emergent; they depend on a mix of interacting dynamic processes, both self-organizing and other-organized (by humans)” (Escobar, 2018). Escobar points out that a key principle of emergence is that it occurs through largely unplanned actions. In line with this, Design Thinking in the Journey focuses on developing individual skills that can support participants in carrying out meaningful local actions and does not aim to facilitate design of largescale or systemic transitions.
In executive programs, Rachel E. Brooks has seen Design Thinking encourage participants to clarify the problems they are trying to address. When applying it to their own contexts, many participants discovered they tended to jump to solutions before exploring the problem and building an understanding of underlying causes. One reflected that prior to the course, “mostly, I did not pay much attention to the workshop tactics, in some cases I started the discussions with the solution, without discussing the challenge in detail. Recently I changed my tactics and the workshops and meetings I attend or facilitate is more successful.” This suggests epistemological shifts, including becoming
Many visible problems in sustainability are symptoms of larger systemic challenges, which design thinking can help uncover. Participants work in teams, leveraging diversity of perspectives and backgrounds as a strength for uncovering problems’ roots. They develop skills in qualitative research methods such as participant and non-participant observation. In Rachel Brooks’ programs, this has encouraged participants to question a tendency to develop solutions based on desk research and instead, take the time to more deeply understand the problem. Referring to Hoggan’s outcomes, this participant’s reflection suggests
In ideation, participants use creativity techniques to develop new ideas, which encourages them to resist tendencies to judge their own or others’ ideas as unfeasible and to experiment with ideas they might normally disregard. They practice methods such as “brainwriting,” a process for sharing ideas that enables all participants, even the most reticent, to share their ideas. It also provides more time for thought. In the Learning Journey, participants write their ideas on Post-it notes in a time-limited session before proposing them on a whiteboard. These participatory methods are useful in complex, multi-stakeholder initiatives, where mastery of the dominant language, socio-cultural backgrounds, and competences vary widely.
Participants later make their ideas tangible through prototyping. For many, this is challenging and pushes them to engage with new
This phase of the Journey engages participants in a way similar to Barad’s description of her own university-based group, which is bound together by a shared commitment to a sustainable world. She told her interviewer, “We flourish as a group by honoring our differences, respectfully disagreeing, and working collaboratively with and through our differences” (Juelskjær & Schwwennesen, 2012, p. 16). Barad’s (2014) concept of diffraction is central to these collaborations. She described it as an “ethico-onto-epistemological engagement, attending to differences and matters of care…in order to creatively repattern world-making practices with an eye to our indebtedness to the past and the future” (p. 16).
What is transformative about diffraction in the context of Design Thinking is the shift away from critique and separation and toward “thinking with and through differences rather than pushing off of or away from and solidifying difference as less than” (Barad, 2014, p. 16). Participants in Rachel Brooks’ programs have pointed out that they learned the problem may not be what they thought it was. The transformative learning here is not a “radical break with the past” (p. 16), but “understands its indebtedness and entanglements to the past and future” (p. 16). We might even say that this socio-material understanding of transformative learning is entangled with past understandings, or in Mezirow’s (1978) description of perspective transformation: “becoming aware that one is caught in one’s own history and reliving it… reformulates the criteria for valuing and for taking action” (p. 100).
Considering the IDG framework, this phase of the Journey contributes to the dimension of Collaborating. Whether or not participants continue to use the Design Thinking cycle as a guide, they cultivate essential
Action Learning
The fourth element of the Journey, Action Learning, enables participants to engage in critical reflection and identify their own agency. Participants engage in Action Learning throughout the Learning Journey, entering a space where they can describe their own challenges. Peers question them about seemingly unsolvable challenges they describe facing and encourage them to think from new angles and question their assumptions. In four executive programs for sustainability facilitated by Rachel Brooks, the Action Learning part of their Journey encouraged reflection and action.
In the Learning Journey, Action Learning has been a powerful method for encouraging the fourth pillar of the European Commission recommendations, “Acting for Sustainability.” It also embodies Barad’s concept of agential realism. Action Learning sessions of 90 minutes accompany multi-modular professional development programs at two-week to one-month intervals. In virtual sets, participants each have 20 minutes to present their challenge and receive questions from their group. While short, this has met the strong need of executive program participants to address their own issues regularly. For participants unfamiliar with such open sharing and listening practices, Rachel Brooks has seen that the short duration increases openness to the process. Critical reflection, as part of the Action Learning process, has helped participants question the assumptions embedded in their work contexts and turn the abstract concept of sustainability into actionable next steps or projects in their professional roles. This has enabled them to
Action Learning has also helped bridge knowledge, experience, and sectors represented within diverse participant groups in open enrollment executive programs. Through Action Learning, participants from diverse levels of seniority and industries built an understanding of other’s perspectives and appreciated the richness this brought to the exchange. Critical reflection in small groups of peers also helped participants build a strong community within their cohort.
That Action Learning can lead to individual transformative learning is not a new idea (Dilworth & Willis, 1999; O’Neil & Marsick, 1994; O’Neil & Marsick, 2007; Robertson et al., 2021; Yorks, O’Neil, Marsick, Nilson & Kolodny, 2002). Lamm (2000), for example, in a study of an Action Learning program at Volvo Truck, found that a sense of trust was an important condition for transformative learning to occur and that spending informal time eating, drinking, and traveling together helped build the environment for the program. Robertson et al. (2021) developed a framework including antecedents, process, and outcomes from their study of Action Learning and transformative learning in management development programs: “Antecedents include readiness to learn, supportive relationships and a diverse team. Process includes active reflection and managing the need for control. Individual transformative learning outcomes include multiple perspectives, self-awareness and self-confidence” (p. 102).
Action Learning unites the five dimensions of the IDG framework, in particular Being, by creating an environment of accountability inviting people to act with
Discussion
This article describes an emerging transformative Learning Journey to help practitioners achieve individual transformations and build their capacity to tackle complex sustainability challenges. The Journey is still being refined, but we share it given the need to develop ways to facilitate transformative learning for sustainability as called for by the European Commission, the UN, UNESCO, and the Inner Developmental Goals. In service to this goal, we offer our reflections on the effectiveness of the transformative learning dimensions of this Journey, the questions we still have, and possibilities for developing the journey.
Facilitated Nature Immersion was a transformative experience for Rachel E. Brooks, and others’ research suggests her experience was not unique. However, questions arose when considering how Nature Immersion can contribute to the transformations needed to enact sustainability efforts on a broader scale. How much nature immersion is needed and at what level of intensity? How can we refine the experience so that it is widely accessible and scalable beyond elite learning institutions and mid-to senior-level executives? Which practices of critical reflection and facilitation are key to making the experience transformative regarding sustainability competences? What key skills and competences do facilitators of these experiences need to have?
The Coffee Case challenged the existing worldviews of participants, which was evident during group reflections as they began asking new questions and proposing new actions related to climate justice: “Are we depending on cheap sources at the price of developing countries?” and “Consider the whole supply chain and impacts on it!” A question for future research is, how can we further support executives and students in turning these worldview shifts into action amidst immense complexity and competing incentives?
Design Thinking helped participants build confidence to take action and provided tools for doing so. However, the focus on the “user” limits the approach for tackling complex sustainability challenges, where there are many so-called users, or stakeholders. We found that Design Thinking helped participants in government and business think in new ways and build empathy for diverse stakeholders; however, the shifts happened primarily on a cognitive rather than an embodied or emotional level.
Action Learning supported participants in building an environment of openness, learning and empathy, seeing connections across their roles, and identifying with commonalities in place of differences. It helped them learn the power of questions for identifying new pathways forward and building community, and it stretched them to define first actions. Questions we will continue to explore for sustainability are for which constellations of stakeholders does Action Learning work best, and in what formats and frequencies of implementation is it most impactful and feasible for students, executives, and organizations?
Conclusion
Working toward a more sustainable world asks us all to contribute to the collective effort to confront the ravages of climate change, ensure that no one person or group is treated unjustly, and transform our world economies so that all can not only survive but thrive. We are all one, people and nature.
With this article, we hope to provide a resource for practitioners across sectors to build the skills identified in the IDG framework needed for achieving progress on the SDGs. The urgency of the sustainability challenges we face call for quick and decisive action, and we invite others to build on what we propose here with this in mind.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
