To realise sustainability transformations, many ideas, stories, and practices need to be modified or abandoned. Much has been made of the insufficiency of the predominant eco-modernist imaginaries of sustainability. The belief in advanced technology, innovation, and modernization as the primary vehicles for sustainability transformations has long been called into question. New imaginaries and stories need to be created and given material form. In our research, we investigate how this could be done, by asking: how can we develop visions for sustainable futures in which humans are situated in nature? How can these visions be enabled in practice? How can we constructively deal with the tensions, altered power relations, conflicts of interests, and emerging potentials as we practically struggle to enact desired futures?
Our research team is transdisciplinary, but we find common ground in the interest to test and interrogate ideas, methods and practices that allows us to imagine, articulate and enact other futures. Through storytelling and co-creative methods, we provide a space for place-based and personal stories of everyday practices and of collectively held imaginaries. Our work is based on contextually grounded collaborations and includes different efforts to transform land-use practices to restore ecosystems and strengthen resilience to climate change.
We undertake case-study work about tensions and possibilities emerging from efforts to shift from conventional to regenerative farming, from even-aged to more diverse forestry in Sweden, and around the restoration of wetlands and pastures. In La Mosquitia, Honduras, we engage in co-creative work to build capacities in local communities to restore biodiversity, strengthen resilience, and stimulate the voluntary carbon market.
Case studies in Focus area 5
Grief in transformation reading group
In this case, members of the research group collaborate in introspective theoretical work through a reading group aimed at processing the hard emotions we (and our research partners and students) encounter as we face the multiple crises of modernity. Together we read and process texts through letter writing, discussion, and creative methods. This group was inspired by the feeling that grieving is a core step in sustainability transformations as we are confronted with the understanding of the drastic changes our society will face. Furthermore, as researchers who encounter the gravity of these challenges daily, we felt the need for a process that we felt is not otherwise supported in our personal or professional lives. Working with texts, such as Hospicing Modernity by Vanessa Machedo de Oliviera, we make space for the difficult emotions we experience and challenge the expectation of researchers as impartial and rational generators of knowledge. In this reflexive practice, we engage with what we perceive is some of the complex emotional work necessary in environmental communication research to contribute to sustainability transformations. We also test explorative methods that could support students, partners, and others process their own grief related to the polycrises.
People involved: Amelia Mutter & Sanna Barrineau
How Can I Act? Forestry Students’ Dilemmas and Thoughts About the Future
Young people in forestry education are a group rarely heard in the debate about forests. Through focus groups, we have gained insights into the thoughts and reflections of high school students and university students regarding their future careers and the ongoing transition in forestry.
The dilemmas they face may involve how to navigate working toward both economic and environmental goals. As one student put it: Leave the buffer zone, they say in one ear, and cut it down in the other. Other dilemmas concern how to act if they discover that a forest owner is cheating with certification rules, or in situations where women are treated differently than men.
To analyze and understand these dilemmas, we draw inspiration from transformative learning. This involves creating change within a context shaped by norms and taken-for-granted assumptions about how forests should be managed. Through communicative learning, we can better understand others’ intentions, beliefs, and emotions. In collaboration with artists, we are developing educational materials where students can reflect together on the assumptions, expectations, and emotions surrounding their dilemmas. Working with dilemmas can create conditions that encourage students to reflect on different perspectives and explore various ways of acting.
People involved: Ann Grubbström, Stina Powell, Sara Holmgren
From Data to Dialogue – Communication about Water Quality in the Swedish Great Lakes
In the project “From data to dialogue”, Lake Mälaren Water Conservation Association wants to identify different interest groups’ perspectives on their lakes through workshops and dialogue. Based on the opinions and knowledge we collect, we will, together with stakeholders, develop how we convey environmental data, so that it suits the needs and interests of the recipient.
The large lakes affect everyone who lives near them, animals and nature and all of us who depend on fresh and clean water. Sweden’s four largest lakes, Vänern, Vättern, Mälaren and Hjälmaren, are facing major challenges such as eutrophication, invasive species and environmental toxins – reinforced by climate change. Challenges that threaten our ecosystems, outdoor life and drinking water supply.
The project relates to environmental communication and WP5 because it is about bringing together citizens, communicators and researchers to gain a common understanding of the values and challenges linked to our lakes, and how we can work together to preserve our ecosystems. The project is about listening to the different stories that exist about the lakes from the perspectives of citizens and environmental monitoring and trying to create a common story about the future.
People involved: Elin Ångman
Trails and tales – mediating human-landscape relations in patchy Anthropocene
“Trails and tales – Mediating human-landscape relations in patchy Anthropocene” is a process-led case, where Marcus Bussey and I attempt to understand how walking trails through multifunctional landscape may help us address and mediate more-than-human relations and (hi)stories. The case emerged from the ongoing work done by the Swedish Center for Nature Interpretation, where I am based at, and my colleagues Eva Sandberg and Per Bengtson have worked directly with other governmental authorities and other actors on how to improve communication along infrastructures such as hiking trails, as well as how to create communicative packages on landscape, values and stories when planning for a hiking trail. Last year, SCNI wrote a report on how to connect pilgrim pedagogics and nature interpretation along pilgrim trails. We have therefore chosen this concrete project SCNI and Pilgrimcenter, Linköpings Stift have collaborated on, looking at two processes that aim to co-create transformative experiences through interweaving cultural and natural heritage along the St. Birgittas Way – and environmental and climate change is an important theme there. We have done fieldwork and met with some of the stakeholders involved in these processes, and will continue to participate in their coming workshops. With ‘pilgrimage trail’ becoming popular and drawing increase public attentions, we see this as an interesting opportunity to think about environmental communication – especially regarding the process of reviving certain old or disappearing trails, and remaking them with local- and community-based memories of the land. “Ecological pilgrimage” and “wayfinding” are among others two concepts we try to think with. This case relates to the WP5 focus area – sustainability transformation as it learns from concrete cases that aim for sustainability transformation, and the work done by the researchers will be in dialogue with the stakeholders, also making direct impacts.
People involved: Jasmine Zhang and Marcus Bussey
Connecting for sustainable local food chains in Hälsingland
This is an interactive seminar series around local food security and strengthened civil preparedness in the region of Hälsingland. Co-hosted by Biosfärområde Voxnadalen, Therese Trädgårdsmat, Hälsinglands Utbildningsförbund, and Mistra EC, this series (2024-2025) invites a wide range of actors from farmers, food producers, catering and restaurants, grocery retail, politicians and civil servants, and individual consumers with an interest in local and sustainable food production.
This series aims to enable exploratory conversations and be a forum for dialogue between all relevant parts of the food chain, building knowledge and understanding between stakeholders. This includes understanding each other’s realities, challenges and opportunities to promote local self-sufficiency through production, purchasing or sales, as well as understanding why such a transition is necessary at all levels. By visiting different sites from local apple orchards to bakeries to mills to college dining halls, this collaboration is based on a process for joint knowledge sharing, rather than a one-sided transfer of information from experts to practitioners.
People involved: Sanna Barrineau
Human-soil relations – Imagining alternative climate futures
This case explores human-soil relations in the context of carbon farming and projects/practices/research that engage with soil health. Within this context, I am interested in 1) temporalities of the human and more than human as they relate to climate change (e.g. how “telling the time with soils” can engage us with alternative timings that are meaningful in coordinating climate action) and, 2) how soils come to be cared for as they are engaged in projects to increase soil health and mitigate the climate crisis (e.g. how EU policy frames care for soils). Building on the work of my PhD thesis with a continued focus on actors engaged in soil health issues (from farmers to soil scientists), I work with the understanding that relationships form the foundations of environmental communication. In exploring forms of communication through diverse temporalities and care lenses, my interest is in how sustainability transformations are happening beyond dominant practices of goal-oriented modeling and measuring, in ways that expand our capacities to imagine alternative possibilities and relationships with soils. This case aims to work conceptually – to work with concepts that support alternative ways to see human/non-human relationships – as well as experiment methodologically so as to foreground relationships and practices that are often marginalized.
People involved: Sanna Barrineau
Imagining and enabling desirable forest futures in Voxnadalen
This case focuses on the transformation of the forest landscape towards greater multifunctionality and diversity. We collaborate with a wide range of actors, including Voxnadalen Biosphere Reserve, Voxkedjan, Region Gävleborg, local municipalities and numerous forest owners. We draw on futures methods, storytelling and games to support a co-creation process that surfaces insights into desirable forest futures and potential pathways to for realizing them. This case is guided by the following questions:
- How do local stakeholders perceive and envision desirable futures for forests?
- What values, knowledge systems, and conflicts shape these forest imaginaries?
- In what ways do local imaginaries align with, or diverge from, national and international forest-related ambitions?
- What innovations in policy and practice emerge to support the realization of these imaginaries?
- How can co-creative methods foster relationship-building and collaboration among actors who often seem disconnected?
This case illustrates environmental communication by examining how shared meanings are collaboratively constructed around critical sustainability issues—including land use change, climate change, and biodiversity within forest landscapes. It further explores how this process supports the co-design of innovations and pathways toward collectively envisioned, more desirable futures.
People involved: Thao Do, Neil Powell, Max Whitman & Sara Holmgren
Paskaia - Moskitia
Paskaia is a community-led reforestation project with the indigenous Miskito people in Honduras. We partner with local families and the indigenous organization MASTA, using co-creation and agroforestry to restore the rainforest and savannah to build economic resilience. The project’s name and guiding concept, Paskaia, is a Miskitu word meaning “to build for the future.”
This project is environmental communication in action. Rather than imposing outside solutions, the entire process is built on dialogue, trust, and co-creation with the Miskito community. Together, we are creating and living a new, positive story for the region’s future, which is the essence of constructive environmental communication.
The case is a direct, practical example of WP5’s focus on “sustainability transformations.” It moves beyond simple restoration to fundamentally transform the community’s relationship with their land—shifting from a path of degradation to one of resilience and self-determination. It embodies the new narratives and sustainable futures that WP5 seeks to understand and foster.
People involved: Magnus Bergström, Max Whitman, Neil Powell & Leonard Palmberg
Read more about Paskaia here (in Swedish).
People and organisations
Sara Holmgren, researcher at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences
Susanna Barrineau, Thao Do, Max Whitman, Neil Powell and Eva Friman, Uppsala University
Stina Powell, Amelia Mutter, Jasmine Zhang and Ann Grubbström, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences
Marcus Bussey, University of the Sunshine Coast
Michael Wilson, Loughborough University
Magnus Bergström, Paskaia
Leonard Palmberg, film photographer
Hanna Alfredsson, Biosphere Reserve Voxnadalen
Maria Richter Simsek, graphic recorder, illustrator and facilitator
Elin Ångman, Mälarens vattenvårdsförbund
Åsa Larsson, The Swedish National Heritage Board
Paula von Seth, artist and art pedagogue
Find contact details to the team members here.
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