Information technologies shape environmental concerns – they prioritise some environmental knowledge over other. For example, search engines and social media, increasingly permeated and shaped by AI, promote carbon-intensive consumption and benefit from the polarisation of environmental issues. Another example is how smartphone apps shape the kind of experiences we have in nature and how we represent those to others. Information technologies already considerably affect everyday life, environmental practice and governance, and their impact will further intensify in the coming years. At the same time as their power is increasing, information technologies are becoming increasingly complex and difficult to understand. In this focus area, researchers and societal actors therefore collaborate to investigate the impact of information technologies and data on people’s understanding and communication about the environment and environmental issues.

Emotions play an important role in sustainability transitions. The existential threats of climate change and biodiversity loss worry many people and generate a range of emotions, such as anxiety, anger and hopelessness. These emotions are not only individual, but also social and often collectively felt. In the focus area of meaning- making, we investigate emotions as intra- individual processes and experiences, but also as resulting from social interaction, cultural norms and as political, mobilised in discursive struggles. From these points of departure, we study the impact of emotions on people’s understanding and actions in sustainability transitions. Empirically we focus on how museums and nature visitor centres can be places for people to meet and discuss their feelings.

Science as a source of knowledge is often contested, especially in the context of environmental policy and sustainability transitions. While such contestation is part of a pluralistic democracy, anti-scientific narratives and relativism impact how knowledge and expertise are referred to and used in decision-making. Although values and emotions have always been influential in governance, their importance has become more explicit in recent years, while also becoming an object of controversy and debate. In this focus area, we explore knowledge, emotions and values in the discussion of environmental issues, and how they affect governance practices.

As resistance to sustainability transformations is growing, environmental governance is under increasing pressure. Process facilitators and other governance practitioners face significant challenges in participatory processes, for example related to wind power establishments and climate policy. In this focus area we study how polarisation and resistance are reshaping power relations in collaborative governance and public participation.

The focus area of transformation centres on practical initiatives that bring people together to envision new and more sustainable futures together, while putting these futures into practice. The research team collaborates with several initiatives, such as regenerative agriculture, continuous-cover forestry and restoration of wetlands, and studies how local land-use narratives resist and enable change towards more regenerative land-use practices.