Transformation

Jens Friis Lund and Mattias Borg Rasmussen

Related terms: adaptation, Anthropocene, justice, resilience, sustainability, transition

What Do We Talk about when We Talk about ‘Transformation’?

‘Transformation’ is an elusive concept. The Oxford English Dictionary entry on ‘transformation’ reveals its wide use in fields ranging from theatre to zoology, mathematics and energy. Across these fields, ‘transformation’ points to a fundamental change in structure, a metamorphosis that changes properties, features and forms. That is, however, rarely how the term is translated into politics within the realm of environmental governance. Here, ‘transformation’ has become an important keyword embraced by policymakers, academics, grassroots movements, corporations, and politicians alike in the debate about how to navigate our time of multiple, interlocking socio-ecological crises. Like ‘sustainability’ before it, ‘transformation’ has developed into a catch-all term that embodies different meanings to different epistemic communities (Scoones et al. 2020). This implies that when different actors mobilise the term in what appears to be a coherent dialogue, its use may mask underlying fundamental differences in values and morality. It also implies that ‘transformation’ risks becoming a term that solely reflects dominant societal logics, epistemologies, ontologies, and their attendant path dependencies.

Within the environmental humanities, ‘transformation’ invokes a more fundamental rethinking of society, building on a broader problematization and analysis of society and human-nature relations (Castree 2014). Here, ‘transformation’ is an invitation to imagine how things might be otherwise, i.e. how to move from what is to what ought to be. Climate justice is a case in point, seeking an understanding of how the experience of local impacts and inequitable vulnerabilities connect to grassroots articulations for just adaptation and, ultimately, transformation (Schlosberg and Collins 2014). More recently, Newell et al. (2021) argue that a transformative approach to climate justice should put an analysis of power at the centre of its inquiry because power is complicit in both the production of the socio-ecological crises, as well as shaping societal approaches to try to address these crises. 

These insights point to a need to frame the conversation about transformation in ways that do not reproduce, reinforce or exacerbate inequalities or injustice (Newell et al. 2021). Contributing to this aim, this entry seeks to provide conceptual clarity to the debates about transformations within environmental governance. In doing so, we proceed in an explicitly situated way. Our goal is not to provide a clear and final definition of the term. Rather, it is to suggest that lest ‘transformation’ becomes yet another buzzword, an empty vessel that can take up whatever meaning anyone actor proposes, we need to retain and make explicit the core moral and onto-epistemic assumptions that distinguish it from related terms, such as transition. To that end, we argue that a justice-focused approach to transformation is useful.

Transformation: The Talk of the Town

‘Transformation’ is rapidly becoming a buzzword within the conversation about our socio-ecological crises. The Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) defines it as “a fundamental, system-wide reorganisation across technological, economic, and social factors, including paradigms, goals and values” (2019, 14). The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) defines “societal transformation” as “a profound and often deliberate shift initiated by communities toward sustainability, facilitated by changes in individual and collective values and behaviours, and a fairer balance of political, cultural, and institutional power in society” (IPCC 2018, 599). These two definitions from institutions that sit at the international science-policy interface of environmental governance exemplify key elements in common understandings of transformation. They both emphasise, for instance, that transformation is about change not only in how we produce and distribute energy, food, etc., but also in individual behaviours and societal norms and values. However, they also differ on important accounts. First, they differ as to whether transformation can be something that happens outside of our control or intention (IPBES), or something that we deliberately seek to put into motion (IPCC). Second, while transformation is pegged to a notion of sustainability by the IPCC, IPBES does not make this connection.

A common feature across different epistemic communities is the tendency to define ‘transformation’ in relation to the related term of ‘transition’ (Eckersley 2021; Scoones, Newell, and Leach 2015). Some see transition as encompassing transformation (Geels and Schot 2007), while others use the two terms interchangeably (Beck et al. 2021; Geels and Turnheim 2022). In the broadly defined political economy community writing about sustainability, the notion of transformation is often set apart from transition by framing it as a process that addresses underlying structural drivers of sustainability challenges, as opposed to more immediate or proximate drivers (Pelling, O’Brien, and Matyas 2015; Newell et al. 2021). In line with this, Scoones, Newell, and Leach (2015) argue that transformation signals a recognition that processes of societal change are characterised by politics and power struggles in ways that transition does not. The recent discussions on the Gramscian notion of trasformismo, that is, the ability of dominant actors to absorb criticisms within the solutions they propose without challenging the underlying distribution of power and privilege, likewise point to the need to keep transformation analytically distinct from transition (Newell 2019).

The transitions studies community offers an approach to thinking about the relationship between transition and transformation that focuses on scale. This community seeks to understand how innovations, such as new technologies, emerge, challenge, and eventually supplant older ones (Geels 2019). This process is conceptualised as taking place within socio-technical systems that fulfil societal functions (e.g. the transport sector). Change within these systems is understood as happening through innovations that emerge in sheltered ‘niches’ that may, in particular circumstances, challenge existing ‘regimes,’ a process that can be supported or inhibited by broader developments within the broader ‘landscape’ within which both regimes and niches exist. This is what is referred to within the literature as ‘the multi-level perspective.’ Within this literature, transition is often seen as changes that take place within a single system or sector (e.g. energy provisioning or transport), whereas transformation denotes broader, society-wide changes (Hölscher, Wittmayer, and Loorbach 2018; Eckersley 2021).

An emerging literature on ‘deep’ transitions has pushed this question of how system-specific transitions may spread across systems to result in wider societal change (Schot and Kanger 2018). It includes a historical perspective on the causes of present sustainability challenges, seeing them as linked to core features of industrial modernity (Pahker, Kanger, and Tinits 2024; Schot and Kanger 2018). This literature invokes Polanyi’s The Great Transformation to exemplify the deep transition that brought us into the present moment, and to argue for the need for another similarly deep transition towards sustainability. However, this literature remains rather focused on technology, gesturing at mass production and an imperative to use fossil fuels as meta-rules that must change in such a deep transition, but without engaging the underlying structural and political implications of Polanyi’s argument (Schot and Kanger 2018).

While the field of transitions studies offers a structured framework to help us understand societal change towards sustainability, it allows only for a limited view of the role of politics and power in processes of transformation. We are left without specific pointers as to what must change within these realms for it to qualify as a transformation. To go a step further towards conceptual clarity, we turn to the justice literature, more specifically to Nancy Fraser’s (1995) thinking on “transformative remedies” as those that target the generative mechanisms of injustices in society.

A Justice Approach to Transformation

In her recent writings, Nancy Fraser has been exploring how capitalism freerides on both human and non-human realms of reproduction, conceptualising it as a system which cannibalises on the foundations of its own existence (e.g. Fraser 2022). Combining insights from Marxist thinking on social reproduction, the environment, and the state (Moore 2016; Streeck 2014; Mies 1986), Fraser argues that the same dynamic that generates ever deeper labor exploitation also systematically takes from the realms of reproduction and the environment more than they can sustain, and erodes democracy through money-politics and reforms that hollow-out the state (Fraser, Jaeggi, and Milstein 2018). A transformative politics must, therefore, attend to the entwinements between the production of cultural, gender and class differences, the drivers of environmental harm, and the erosion of political participation (or democracy).

Fraser’s analysis resonates with debates within the environmental humanities on the Great Acceleration or the Anthropocene (see, for example, Sörlin 2012; Castree 2014). These have provided much-needed critical interventions by pointing to the constitution of the modern Western project and its entanglements among science, culture and technology in a quest for growth and progress, seeing these as important explanations for the general crisis facing us today. While Fraser is mainly concerned with the injustices to humans produced by capitalism as a system, her conceptualisation of capitalism is so broad as to capture elements of what others might see as the onto-epistemic features of modernity. Building on eco-Marxist and ecofeminist scholarship (e.g. Merchant 1980; Plumwood 1993; Moore 2016; Saito 2020), she forwards a conceptualisation of capitalism as a system that organises the boundaries that set apart exploitation from expropriation, production from reproduction, society from nature, and economy from polity.

To grasp the justice implications of this analysis and guide us towards transformation, it is worth revisiting Fraser’s earlier work. Writing about social justice in the 1990s, Fraser (1995) developed a distinction between ‘affirmative’ and ‘transformative’ remedies for injustices. Transformative remedies are those that correct unjust outcomes by restructuring the underlying generative frameworks that create them, while affirmative remedies focus on correcting outcomes in ways that do not address the underlying generative framework. The distinction was important to understand and overcome dilemmas between injustices within the realms of recognition (or identity) based on cultural valuation, and redistribution (or class) based on political-economic conditions, respectively. Fraser argued that affirmative remedies may generate trade-offs and offered remedies to mitigate against class-based injustices as an illustrative example. In this example, affirmative remedies could be social insurance programs for all workers and income transfers to the unemployed. To Fraser, these would indeed remedy the impacts of labour exploitation. However, given the imperatives of competition and cost-cutting within a capitalist system, they would have to be maintained or even expanded over time to counter the effects of ever-deepening exploitation. This would, in turn, run the risk that these groups would be seen as deficient, lazy, or needy, and thus result in misrecognition. To avoid this, Fraser argued, we must turn to transformative measures that deal with the dynamic of exploitation, i.e. dismantle the power of capitalists vis-à-vis workers that characterises the capitalist system.

Fraser’s early work provides a concise language and approach to inquiring into the relationship between problem-solution and the underlying, generative framework. In place of gestures at scale, politics and power, it provides a clear distinguishing line between affirmative and transformative remedies with a view to how they deal with the constitutive elements of capitalism and the dilemmas that arise in addressing them. That, we argue, helps draw out the contours of transformation and distinguish it from that which it is not. To qualify as transformative, environmental governance remedies must attend to several dimensions of justice. It must nurture more relational and equitable ideas about the relationship between humans and nature. It must ensure that realms of reproduction are rendered visible, valued and protected from processes of expropriation. It must contribute to the democratisation of environmental governance processes.

While Fraser’s distinction between affirmation and transformation arose out of concerns about social justice in the troubled relation between individual and collective rights, her more recent work points more clearly towards a critique of the liberal subject. Her argument for a trans-environmental movement is a case in point (Fraser 2022). We believe that insights from the environmental humanities could push further the boundaries of the subjects of justice. These boundaries are porous and destabilised by the fundamental critique of the modern separation between nature and culture. The scholarship on ecological justice extends notions of justice to the non-human world (Schlosberg 2007). More recently, multi-species justice has sought to move further beyond the human individual as the subject of justice (Chao and Celermajer 2023). These are open categories, though. Hence, as frames are drawn to define the boundaries of recognition and representation in the remaking of legal, economic, and social structures, we suggest that the fundamental distinction between affirmative and transformative remedies is a useful heuristic. Just like social insurance programs run the risk of misrecognition of their human beneficiaries, so would favouring nonhuman nature in the realm of distribution run the risk of generating misrecognition in the absence of more fundamental changes to the way nonhuman nature is understood and valued in society.

While more precise than most other attempts at capturing the essence of transformation, Fraser’s work, too, leaves ample room for debate. For instance, how do we in practice distinguish measures that diffuse the constitutive elements of capitalism from those that do not? Clearly, different theories of social change would offer different answers. While redistributive taxation from one perspective can be seen as conserving the capitalist societal model by legitimising it, from another perspective, it can be seen as providing the necessary material basis for working-class groups to engage more substantially in political contestations of the societal model. What constitutes more or less transformative measures has to be discussed in light of different theories of change and their attendant evidence base. While this may disappoint those hoping for a clear dividing line between transformative and non-transformative remedies, it at least offers clarity with respect to the terms on which the debate should be had: How does your idea of transformation relate to the constitutive elements of capitalism? What is your theory of change? How well can you support that theory with evidence? What are your onto-epistemic assumptions about what counts as evidence?

Conclusion

Approaching the concept of ‘transformation’ from the perspective of justice brings clarity to this otherwise fuzzy and ambiguous term. Transformation is about diffusing the generative framework of broadly defined capitalist dynamics that drives our entwined socio-ecological crises of economic inequality, cultural stigmatisation, environmental breakdown, and erosion of democratic values. Just as transformative remedies avoid generating misrecognition when addressing maldistribution in a class-based society, so can transformative remedies to the climate crisis avoid fanning the flames of other dimensions of the general crisis.

However, just as we need theory to guide us in identifying the underlying generative mechanisms for sustainability challenges, we also need a theory of change to understand how different remedies may – more or less directly – target these mechanisms. There is no way, ex ante, to know which route offers the best chances of diffusing the mechanisms that reproduce unjust and unsustainable conditions. But at least there can be agreement on transformation as an outcome, while we must constantly engage in a debate about what theories of change we consider relevant in a particular time and place.

Thus, while we must engage theory – both of what drives unsustainable outcomes and of how such drivers may be addressed in processes of change – to distinguish transformative measures, we must also readily acknowledge our limited ability to foresee and control the consequences of our attempts at fostering the kinds of social change we want to see. 

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