Publications

Per Olsson, Michele-Lee Moore. 2024. A resilience-based transformations approach to peacebuilding and transformative justice. Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cosust.2023.101392

Moving from a state of war or violent conflict will require a transformation, but there are no guarantees that transformations automatically lead to peace, sustainability, and justice. This review focuses on the temporary phase when a system is in limbo between the existing, dominant state and a new alternative state. We combine insights from a resilience approach to transformations with peacebuilding and transformative justic...

Olsson, P., C. Folke, and M.-L. Moore. 2022. Capacities for navigating large-scale sustaina­bility transformations: Exploring the revolt and remembrance mechanisms for shaping collapse and renewal in social-ecological systems. In: Gunderson, L., C.R Allen and A. Garmestani (eds.) . Applied Panarchy: Applications and Diffu­sion across Disciplines. Island Press, Washington DC, USA. Pp. 155-180

Lam, D., Jiménez-Aceituno, A., Guerrero Lara, L., Sellberg, M., Norström, A., Moore, M., Peterson, G., Olsson, P. 2022. Amplifying actions for food system transformation: insights from the Stockholm region. Sustainability Science. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11625-022-01154-7

Food is essential to people and is one of the main ways in which people are connected to the world’s ecosystems. However, food systems often cause ecosystem degradation and produce ill-health, which has generated increasing calls to transform food systems to be more sustainable. The Swedish food system is currently undergoing substantial change. A varied set of local actors have created alternative sustainability initiatives t...

Sellberg, M., Norrby, J., Nowak, A., Rönnquist, L., Olsson, P., Peterson, G., Alvsilver, A. 2022. Rapid Transition Lab - Navigating transformations in times of crises towards healthy, sustainable and just Swedish and planetary food systems. Stockholm Resilience Centre, Dark Matter Labs, and Vinnova. https://doi.org/10.17045/sthlmuni.21275946.v1

The centrality of food to human flourishing combined with how food is currently a source of many social and environmental problems means that many of the broader sustainability challenges can be addressed by fundamental changes to the production, distribution, and consumption of food. Such changes are central to what has been referred to as food system transformations. Transformations require significant changes in multiple di...

Economy and Finance for a Just Future on a Thriving Planet

Eriksson, H., Blythe, J.L., Österblom, H. & Olsson, P. 2021. Beyond social-ecological traps: fostering transformations towards sustainability. Ecology and Society 26(1) 13.

This Special Feature is motivated by the rigorous, and growing, theoretical and empirical body of literature on social-ecological traps. Building on the foundational literature, which describes the context in many of the places where we work, we now look forward and ask how we can better understand and enable the breaking and escaping of social-ecological traps. In this Special Feature we focus on this frontier in the field a...

Ely, A., Marin, A., Charli-Joseph, L., Abrol, D., Apgar, M., Atela, J., Ayre, B., Byrne, R., Choudhary, B.K., Chengo, V. and Cremaschi, A., 2020. Structured Collaboration Across a Transformative Knowledge Network—Learning Across Disciplines, Cultures and Contexts?. Sustainability, 12(6), p.2499.

Realising the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) will require transformative changes at micro, meso and macro levels and across diverse geographies. Collaborative, transdisciplinary research has a role to play in documenting, understanding and contributing to such transformations. Previous work has investigated the role of this research in Europe and North America, however the dynamics of transdisciplinary research on ‘trans...

Herrfahrdt-Pähle, E., Schlüter, M., Olsson, P., Folke, C., Gelcich, S. and Pahl-Wostl, C., 2020. Sustainability transformations: socio-political shocks as opportunities for governance transitions. Global Environmental Change, 63.

Faced with accelerating environmental challenges, research on social-ecological systems is increasingly focused on the need for transformative change towards sustainable stewardship of natural resources. This paper analyses the potential of rapid, large-scale socio-political change as a window of opportunity for transformative change of natural resources governance. We hypothesize that shocks at higher levels of social organiz...

Scoones, I., Stirling, A., Abrol, D., Atela, J., Charli-Joseph, L., Eakin, H., Ely, A., Olsson, P., Pereira, L., Priya, R. and van Zwanenberg, P., 2020. Transformations to sustainability: combining structural, systemic and enabling approaches. Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability, 42, pp.65-75.

The imperatives of environmental sustainability, poverty alleviation and social justice (partially codified in the Sustainable Development Goals or SDGs) call for ambitious societal transformations. As such, few aspects of actionable knowledge for sustainability are more crucial than those concerning the processes of transformation. This article offers a brief overview of different conceptualisations of transformation, and ou...

Effects of transformations to climate-neutral societies on low- and middle-income countries. Olsson, P., Bohlin, M., Moberg, F. Brief, Stockholm Resilience Centre, Stockholm University, 2020.

This is a Rapid Assessment Report for Sida and the network Swedish Leadership for Sustainable Development. The report concludes that transformations to climate-neutral societies is more urgent than ever, and that business will have an increasingly large role to play. However, as shown by the case studies in the report, good intentions can lead to unintended consequences for sustainability and justice in low- and middle-income...