Addressing the series of crises facing humanity –  the most urgent being environmental, health, and food – will take collective global action. In recent years, countries have stepped up their collaborative efforts to mitigate climate change and address widening inequalities in income, livelihood, health and access to food. In doing so, together they have established global development and climate objectives, outlined in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the Paris Agreement, and other international arrangements. To achieve the goals outlined by the Paris Agreement and the SDGs, many of which come due in 2030, sweeping transformational changes must take place.

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) came together to explore, through selected consultations and a desk study,  how such transformational change has been defined in the stakeholder’s practice and in the scientific literature, what it means, what drives it and how implementation can be improved  The results are presented in the recently published “Transformational change to reduce deforestation and climate change impacts: A review of definitions, concepts and drivers in scientific and grey literature.” Elements of this technical review will help stakeholders working on transformational change design their transformations in efficient and effective ways.

To answer two guiding questions on what transformational change means and what drives it, 111 scientific articles on transformational change in health and business, land use, natural resources and climate change were analyzed. The review found that while health, education and business literature clearly document the concept of transformational change, literature on transformational change in the land-use and climate change sectors remains sparse. In the last two decades, publications detailing transformational change in forestry and land-use have, for the most part, related to reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD+). Literature on transformational change is relatively new and has been produced by scholars, from a limited number of organizations, in just a few developed countries, including the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia and Canada.

The study also highlights that there are three dimensions of transformational change – scale, speed and depth of change. Transformations should be deep enough to be effective, yet also speedy (the 2030 goal is around the corner) and sweeping (affecting large tracts of the globe to be most efficient). A number of drivers influence these ‘paradigm shifts,’ largely organized into four groups, which include:

• resources, factors that influence changemaking;
• legitimacy, characteristics that make change accepted by society and worthy of allocated resources;
• processes, which harmonize efforts and value of change;
• and norms, which guide efforts so transformational change is sustainable.

The study further explores transformational change theory and monitoring and identifies gaps in the literature where further research is needed. Areas found to lack adequate research include exploring the synergies between adaptation and mitigation narratives in the literature that are focused on the human capacity to undertake transformational change. Also, a ‘big picture’ approach must be taken more often for transformational projects – stakeholders involved in transformational change frequently address only one aspect of change, not paying attention to the entire system – this can jeopardize success.  

As countries fight the clock to achieve a sustainable world in a quickly changing climate, this study helps identify the elements and drivers of transformations needed for them to meet national and international sustainable development and environmental targets more efficiently and effectively. To meet NDCs, SDGs and limit warming to less than 1.5°C, broad, systematic, transformational changes are needed, and the global community must continue to work together to make such change possible. Now they have a tool to understand where the levers are for the needed paradigm shifts.

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