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It seems to me that much depends on unpacking what ‘context’ or contextual factors trigger transformational processes and outcomes. In many contexts in the Global South (GS) or majority world, evidence indicates that communities think from and are motivated by different value and belief systems to those in the Global North, suggesting their institutional context and transformational pathways will follow different trajectories. My own experience (which I trace in a forthcoming article) is one of becoming more aware of my own WEIRD (Western-educated, industrialised, rich and ‘developed’) positionality, and becoming less WEIRD. This has enabled me to journey with and better understand the collective choices and journeys of less- and non-WEIRD communities.

A strengths-based, principled, systemic approach that emphasises relational embeddedness and values seems conducive to sustainable and sustained scaling when it nurtures key kinds of emancipatory feedback learning.

While I acknowledge that there is a Western tradition of systemic-analytical relationalities I wonder whether non-Western systemic-holistic relationalities may be a better entry point - since these overlap with and draw on most or all of your other relational approaches to sustainability transformations. Largely unacknowledged, GS communities already have systemic thinking capabilities, but linked to holism.

Perhaps also ‘sustainability science’ in its WEIRDness is as much a prison as it is a pathway to sustainability (eg its belief systems and biases against other knowledge systems can obscure where we should be looking for sustainable pathways)?

Bill Walker