In this conceptual paper we bring our different tools together to contribute to sustainability transformations literature, which has often focussed on how to control and manage systems. Using our approaches, we turn our attention to people’s lived experience and the ways that together they make sense of transformative change in their lives. We expand the idea of transformation to a more plural, complex process by paying attention to what happens in non-voluntary transformations, and where intent and desirability are ambiguous, and in so doing enable new kinds of questions to be asked. This expansion can also speak to recent contributions of transformative experience, values shifts, and the ‘inward’ turn.

Co-authors: Victoria Wibeck, Björn-Ola Linner, Kristin Zeiler.