TRANSFORM – Driving Transformative Environmental Governance

The TRANSFORM project will investigate how civil society actors drive change towards transformative environmental governance. Current scholarship claims that such a change is a crucial element to improve our responses to climate change, biodiversity loss and the host of daunting challenges these pose. This viewpoint is shared by key actors in global environmental governance as well as civil society actors (CSAs), and all converge in underlining the need to shift away from the existing system of environmental governance rooted in understandings of the ‘environment’ as a set of resources. While emerging work on transformative environmental governance focuses on the fundamental elements that will characterise this governance model, there is less detail available about how such a transformation will come about. Although CSAs are seen as key drivers of transformative change, questions about how their actions will drive change remain.

The TRANSFORM project will unpack how different CSAs are driving changes towards transformative environmental governance by conducting multi-method, holistic case studies of actors working towards such change at multiple levels of governance. It will focus on the Italian context and investigate cases at the local, national and international levels. It hypothesises, on the basis of the emerging literature, that CSAs of different types can challenge the overarching norms that currently shape environmental governance through bottom-up paths where they encourage and enact innovative changes to social-ecological systems, and through demands for change at multiple institutional levels. After a period dedicated to conceptual work to deepen the hypothetical understanding of how transformative environmental governance may be driven by CSAs, case studies will be carried out following a participatory and multimethod approach in line with the expertise of the research units. The case studies will then be placed in complex contexts via political process and qualitative network analysis. Using the claims of the case studies as a starting point, the project will then conduct an innovative content analysis to trace transformative impacts in different sites of environmental governance.

The project follows a clearly structured research plan, organised in distinct yet complementary work packages that will allow the research team to achieve clear objectives, set out in a series of milestones, and deliver a series of academic findings in open access publications. The project will also pay attention to impacts on CSAs themselves, seeking to support them to continue driving transformative change in environmental governance, and to delivering findings in accessible ways to policy makers. Above all, the project will answer key questions about how to transform our efforts to protect the environment at a time when unique opportunities, linked to perceptions of multiple crises, are open.

Leading unit (Università di Trento): Louisa Parks (Principal Investigator) and Bartek Goldmann

SNS research unit: Lorenzo Zamponi (associate PI) and Martina Lo Cascio

FUNDING: Italian government (PRIN PNRR 2022)