Leverage points for sustainability transformation

By D. Abson, J. Fischer, J. Leventon, J. Newig, Thomas Schomerus, U. Vilsmaier, H. Wehrden, P. Abernethy, Christopher D. Ives, Nicolas W. Jager and 1 more. Ambio, 2017

1,295 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Despite substantial focus on sustainability issues in both science and politics, humanity remains on largely unsustainable development trajectories. Partly, this is due to the failure of sustainability science to engage with the root causes of unsustainability. Drawing on ideas by Donella Meadows, we argue that many sustainability interventions target highly tangible, but essentially weak, leverage points (i.e. using interventions that are easy, but have limited potential for transformational change). Thus, there is an urgent need to focus on less obvious but potentially far more powerful areas of intervention. We propose a research agenda inspired by systems thinking that focuses on transformational ‘sustainability interventions’, centred on three realms of leverage: reconnecting people to nature, restructuring institutions and rethinking how knowledge is created and used in pursuit of sustainability. The notion of leverage points has the potential to act as a boundary object for genuinely transformational sustainability science.

Subfields: Education, Global and Planetary Change, Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/fd12dc33574fc1cd36e5c2ccf002e16f3342a6c3

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Citations in the corpus

Pollinator monitoring more than pays for itself (2020, background): “This study provides a strong economic and scientific argument that monitoring is both affordable and highly beneficial for ecological research, decision-making, conservation action and ultimately underpinning the transformative change required to sustain nature (Abson et al., 2017).”
Is the 1.5°C target possible? Exploring the three spheres of transformation (2018, background): “The three spheres correspond quite well with the 12 leverage points for systems change identified by Donella Meadows [60] (Figure 2), which have been considered a useful framework for conceptualizing transformation [61].”
Initial progress in implementing the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs): a review of evidence from countries (2018, background): “In this context, systems thinking is promoted as a scientific methodology and set of tools for dealing with complexity, providing a framework for understanding dynamic feedbacks and interlinkages and integration across the dimensions of sustainable development (Abson et al. 2017; Smith 2011).”
Leverage Points for Governing Agricultural Soils: A Review of Empirical Studies of European Farmers’ Decision-Making (2018, background): “, areas for easy interventions that can result in potential significant changes [11,12]; however, ‘there is no precise assessment on how the existing policies have affected, and will further impact, the pressure on agricultural soils in Europe.”
Equity and sustainability in the Anthropocene: a social–ecological systems perspective on their intertwined futures (2018, background): “We argue that, whilst the overall framing of Agenda 2030 certainly aims at shifting global design and intent leverage points, the SDG targets themselves are largely focused on parameters or feedbacks (sensu [85]).”
Translating Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) Interdependencies into Policy Advice (2019, background): “Moreover, the complexity that results from the intertwined character of the SDGs and the urgency to achieve change requires a trans-disciplinary process of research with policy-making for the most powerful interventions for transformational change [39,40].”
Innovation Systems for Transformations towards Sustainability? Taking the Normative Dimension Seriously (2017, positive): “Thus, normativity on a practical level cannot be understood independently from a paradigmatic one, but certain practices may also serve as (leverage) points to intervene in a system to facilitate a paradigm shift [131].”
A relational turn for sustainability science? Relational thinking, leverage points and transformations (2020, background): “A leverage points perspective, inspired by systems theorist Donella Meadows, suggests that challenging and transcending paradigms is a means of initiating transformations towards sustainability (Meadows 1999; Abson et al. 2017).”