Higher Education Leadership: Cruise or Expedition?

Higher education can create space for learning where students can work with integrated real-world issues, thereby creating value for others while building transformative leadership capabilities. It requires organisational leaders understand how to distinguish between two logics for leadership: the cruise and expedition logic, respectively. Good leadership understands the value of expeditions for the development of the entire system

Student-led sustainability transformations: employing realist evaluation to open the black box of learning in a Challenge Lab curriculum

Purpose – While sustainability-oriented education is increasingly placing importance on engaging students in inter- and transdisciplinary learning processes with societal actors and authentic challenges in the centre, little research attends to how and what students learn in such educational initiatives. This paper aims to address this by opening the ‘black box’ of learning in a Challenge Lab curriculum with transformational sustainability ambitions.Design/methodology/approach – Realist evaluation was employed as an analytical frame that takes social context into account to unpack learning mechanisms and associated learning outcomes. A socio-cultural perspective on learning was adopted, and ethnographic methods, including interviews and observations, were used.Findings – Three context-mechanism-outcome (CMO) configurations were identified, capturing what students placed value and emphasis on when developing capabilities for leading sustainability transformations:\ua0 (1) engaging with complex ‘in-between’ sustainability challenges in society with stakeholders across sectors and perspectives; (2) navigating purposeful and transformative change via backcasting; and (3) ‘whole-person’ learning from the inside-out as an identity-shaping process, guided by personal values.Originality – This paper delineates and discusses important learning mechanisms and outcomes when students act as co-creators of knowledge in a sustainability-oriented educational initiative, working with authentic challenges together with societal actors.Practical implications – The findings of this paper can inform the design, development, evaluation, and comparison of similar educational initiatives across institutions, while leaving room for contextual negotiation and adjustment

Comparing sustainability transition labs across process, effects and impacts: Insights from Canada and Sweden

Purposeful transformative change on a level of societal systems, structures and practices is called for in response to contemporary sustainability challenges. Sustainability transition labs and arenas represent a particular set of governance innovations seeking to foster systemic change based on deliberate engagement of multiple actors around complex issues of concern. Most labs aim for long-term contributions in addressing persistent societal challenges and transitioning into sustainability, yet are seldomly evaluated on whether, how and to what extents such contributions become realised in practice. In this paper, we further an analytical framework for comparatively analysing sustainability transition labs and arenas with emphasis on their processes, effects and impacts. The framework is applied on two cases: Energy Futures Lab initiated in Alberta, Canada and the arenas for a Fossil Independent West Sweden - Climate 2030. In particular, the comparison showcases how contextual difference in terms of urgency and turbulence may influence lab activities and how ownership and governance conditions may influence the various directions outputs, effects and wider impacts took. The comparison further illuminates how backcasting and the multi-level perspective may serve as complementary frameworks and tools in lab processes, whose respective role may depend on aspiration and context. We end the paper by providing a series of key considerations in furthering the comparative analytical framework and its application in practice. They orient around the three guiding questions on the why\u27s, what\u27s, and how\u27s of doing comparative research on sustainability transition arenas and labs across their processes, effects and impacts

Learning to Frame Complex Sustainability Challenges in Place: Explorations Into a Transdisciplinary “Challenge Lab” Curriculum

Complex sustainability challenges may never be fully solved, rather requiring continuous, adaptive, and reflexive responses over time. Engagement of this nature departs from well-structured problems that entail expected solutions; here, focus shifts toward ill-structured or ill-defined issues characterized by wickedness. In the context of complex challenges, inadequate or absent framing has performative implications on action. By overlooking the value of framing, eventual responses may not only fall short; they may even displace, prolong, or exacerbate situations by further entrenching unsustainability. In educational settings, we know little about how curriculum designs support challenge framing, and how students experience and learn framing processes. In this paper we explore a transdisciplinary “Challenge Lab” (C-Lab) curriculum from a perspective of challenge framing. When considering framing in higher education, we turn to the agenda in education for, as and with sustainable development to be problem-solving, solutions-seeking or challenge-driven. We introduce framing as a boundary object for transformative praxis, where sustainability is held to be complex and contextual. This study is qualitative and case-based, designed to illuminate processes of and experiences into sustainability challenge framing in a transdisciplinary learning setting. Methodologically, we draw from student reflective diaries that span the duration of a curriculum design. We structure our results with the support of three consecutive lenses for understanding “curriculum”: intended, enacted, and experienced curriculum. First, we present and describe a C-Lab approach at the level of ambition and design. Here it is positioned as a student-centered space, process, and institutional configuration, working with framing and re-framing complex sustainability challenges in context. Second, we present a particular C-Lab curriculum design that unfolded in 2020. Third, we illustrate the lived experiences and practical realities of participating in C-Lab as students and as teachers. We reflect upon dilemmas that accompany challenge framing in C-Lab and discuss the methodological implications of this study. Finally, we point toward fruitful research avenues that may extend understandings of challenge framing in higher education

Sustainability-oriented labs in real-world contexts: An exploratory review

There are growing claims that meaningfully engaging with complex sustainability challenges requires change of a systemic nature. In governing transitions to sustainability, laboratories in real world contexts are growing in presence and promise. Yet, they span an array of contexts, conceptualisations and cases, making it difficult to find and relate labs across disciplines. Moreover, it is unclear how these labs vary in their approaches to sustainability, the importance of which has been voiced by the sustainability transitions community. In addressing these concerns, we adopted the broad research question:\ua0How can sustainability-oriented labs in real-world contexts be understood?\ua0We systematically reviewed 53 labs from disparate fields of research that broadly share a focus on sustainability. Through a mixed-methods analysis, we present three levels of results. Firstly, we provide an overview of the diversity in distribution, thematic focus and setup of labs. Secondly, we trace 7 different research communities where sustainability-oriented labs have been conceptualized (Living, Urban Living, Real-world, Evolutionary Learning, Urban Transition, Change and Transformation labs). Thirdly, we identify three key dimensions of labs, space, process and organisation, enabling a structured understanding of lab approaches towards sustainability. We then situate our results within salient transitions research areas, namely transition geographies, governance and innovation. In concluding, we point towards fruitful avenues for future research, capable of 1) unpacking lab approaches to sustainability as a dynamic normative property, and 2) providing a basis for complementary case-based comparison

Sustainability-oriented labs in transitions: An empirically grounded typology

Sustainability is high on the political agenda, with its analytical and practical importance underscored in the field of sustainability transitions. Experiments, arenas, and laboratories are frequently highlighted as real-world objects to investigate sustainability in place. Despite existing lab studies, attempts at comparison at the empirical level remain unconvincing. Here, sustainability remains oversimplified, warranting further investigation to unpack how labs compare in their orientation towards sustainability. This article presents a rigorous and transparent empirically grounded typology, intended to discern ways to engage with sustainability. We outline and elaborate upon six distinctive types entitled: 1) Fix and control, 2) (Re-)Design and optimize, 3) Make and relate, 4) Educate and engage, 5) Empower and govern, and 6) Explore and shape. This study highlights similarities and differences between labs, and across different types. These findings are discussed with reference to ongoing conceptualizations on directionality, providing a fruitful point of departure for ongoing transitions research

Navigating Sustainability Transformations: Backcasting, transdisciplinarity and social learning

Complex and persistent sustainability challenges necessitate transformations into futures that are fundamentally different to what was before. Such change processes cannot be planned in traditional ways; they require reflexive modes of governing where we collectively learn how to navigate uncharted terrain while exploring it.The aim of this thesis is to contribute knowledge on how sustainability transformations can be navigated in practice. Such efforts are essentially transdisciplinary where actors across sectors, perspectives and disciplines are brought together around a complex issue, question or challenge of concern in context. By drawing from knowledge and experience on how systems develop and the possibility to influence how they should develop, such processes seek to both understand and address complex challenges by means of resolving problematic situations and transforming established systems, structures and practices. Efforts to navigate sustainability transformations in practice are far from straightforward; they require adequate conditions including methodological support to become meaningful as well as impactful.This thesis builds upon a backcasting from principles methodology to support engagement with complex sustainability challenges and transformations. It recognises the transdisciplinary condition of reflexive governance and the contextual contingency of such practices. It is underlaboured with critical realism and a systems-based approach and approaches deliberate and purposeful attempts to navigate transformations as processes of transformative social learning. Further, the thesis puts key attention to issues of Education for Sustainable Development.The thesis adheres to an ethnographic research tradition with qualitative/intensive research designs, guided by three interrelated methodological moves: (1) initial engagement with cases focusing on gathering experiences from participating actors and societal effects from backcasting processes in their wider governance and learning setting, educational as well as informal; (2) conceptual development to enhance backcasting processes in transdisciplinary settings, with focus on how guiding principles for sustainability can be collectively negotiated, and; (3) analytical deepening to better understand and explain how and why experiences and effects are generated in backcasting processes with attention to their surrounding contexts. These three methodological moves resulted in five research papers, for which I dedicate this thesis to position and further discuss.The main contributions of this thesis are: (1) a positioning of a principles-based purposeful, systemic, transformative and reflexive praxis with an associated and further developed backcasting from principles methodology. This methodology consists of a series of suggested steps, actions, guiding questions, qualities and features that seek to enhance the way complex sustainability challenges can be addressed to make efforts of navigating sustainability transformations in practice meaningful and impactful; (2) studies into a concrete curriculum model with transformational sustainability ambitions, Challenge Lab, whose curriculum design has been further conceptualised and mechanisms of learning empirically investigated. The curriculum design and associated mechanisms of learning may support the design, development, evaluation and comparison of educational initiatives that seek to create space for students to engage with complex sustainability challenges in their authentic societal context in open-ended processes together with societal actors, and; (3) an exploration of the necessity and potential value of comparing processes, effects and impacts from transformative, transdisciplinary and reflexive governance initiatives across contexts to better establish what works, for whom and why. Such knowledge moves beyond cumulation of knowledge on the particular methods and tools deployed in cases, into underlying features and mechanisms on which knowledge may be cumulated, generalised and transferred across cases and contexts.Finally, navigating sustainability transformations in practice is as much dependent on our collective capability of stepping back to reflect by asking questions of why, as stepping forward to act by asking questions of how. This thesis introduces a further interest in exploring whether, how and to what extent backcasting as methodological frame may guide the concrete design of transdisciplinary sustainability-oriented initiatives and condition processes of transformative social learning

A space for learners to lead and leaders to learn: Challenge Lab

Guiding sustainability transitio