The timing matters. The post-COVID-19 new normal era has accelerated digital transformation, hybrid learning, and demands for resilience, and vocational graduates enter a labor market that increasingly rewards adaptability as much as technical skill. Education for sustainable development has long argued that learners need systems thinking, collaboration, and decision-making capacity, but assessment frameworks from UNESCO, the OECD, the Council of Europe, and academic researchers have each proposed different components and classifications. That inconsistency, the authors argue, produces ambiguity and unreliable evaluations, especially when instruments designed for one social context are applied to another. Prior research warns that indicators misaligned with organizational or cultural context can generate erroneous outcomes, and assessments that ignore user feedback compound the problem.

To build their framework, the researchers started from a synthesis of ten major conceptual sources, which together yielded thirty-nine candidate indicators of transformative competency, ranging from critical thinking and conflict resolution to futures-thinking, tolerance of ambiguity, and creative thinking. They surveyed 214 vocational teachers drawn from technical colleges across all five regions of Thailand, each with more than five years of classroom experience, asking them to rate every indicator on a five-point importance scale. The data were then subjected to exploratory factor analysis, a statistical technique that identifies underlying dimensions hiding within correlated survey responses.

The statistical results were striking. The Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin measure of sampling adequacy reached 0.974, far above typical thresholds, and Bartlett’s test of sphericity confirmed the data were highly suitable for factor analysis. More revealing was the structure itself: the first factor alone explained 61.07 percent of the total variance, while the second and third factors explained only 3.81 and 2.72 percent respectively. Following Reckase’s criterion that a first factor explaining at least 20 percent of variance signals essential unidimensionality, the team concluded that transformative competency for sustainability behaves substantially as a single unified construct. Nine indicators with the strongest loadings formed the final assessment framework: strategies-thinking competency, tolerance of ambiguity, futures-thinking competency, integrated problem-solving competency, creating new value, capacity-building competency, systems-thinking competency, ability to communicate, and intrapersonal competency.

With the framework established, the team built two complementary instruments rather than relying on a conventional Likert-scale questionnaire, a deliberate choice reflecting their view that these competencies encompass contextual judgment and behavior, not just attitudes. The first is a 36-question multiple-choice situational judgment test in which students respond to realistic scenarios, such as how to act on critical feedback from a teacher, with answers scored from one to three points depending on the sophistication of the chosen response. The second is a nine-question multiple-response test where students select up to four actions from eight options per question, with only four of the options carrying points. Each of the nine competencies is measured through four situational judgment questions worth up to 12 points plus one multiple-response item worth up to 4 points, producing a combined score range of 4 to 16 per competency.

The psychometric validation was rigorous. Content validity indices assessed by five experts reached 0.96 for the situational judgment version and 1.00 for the multiple-response version after revision. Pilot testing with 120 students at Donmueang Technical College produced reliabilities of 0.81 and 0.71 respectively, both above the conventional 0.70 benchmark. Confirmatory factor analysis then demonstrated excellent model fit for both instruments: the situational judgment version yielded a chi-square of 12.72 with 27 degrees of freedom, a goodness-of-fit index of 0.98, and a root mean square error of approximation of essentially zero, with factor loadings between 0.52 and 0.70. The multiple-response version showed similarly strong fit indices.

Applying the tools to 504 students aged 16 to 20, sampled across Thailand’s five regions, the researchers established norm-referenced criteria by dividing the normal distribution into three bands at one standard deviation above and below the mean. The verdict was consistent across nearly every competency: the majority of students scored at the medium level, with proportions ranging from about 63 percent for integrated problem-solving to 74 percent for communication ability. High-level scores were rare, typically between 13 and 20 percent, and the intrapersonal competency showed the largest low-level group at just over 20 percent. The authors attribute these middling results to a rapidly changing technological environment that students have not yet fully adapted to, and they point to evidence that adaptability and work self-efficacy are crucial determinants of whether young people can close this gap.

Perhaps the most policy-relevant finding emerged from the multivariate comparison across regions. Wilks’ Lambda analysis confirmed that geographic region had a statistically significant effect on all nine competencies, with pairwise comparisons revealing systematic differences, frequently involving the northern and southern regions relative to others. Intrapersonal competency showed the largest regional effect, with a partial eta squared of 0.085. The authors interpret this geographic variability as evidence that social, cultural, and resource differences shape competency development, and they argue that rigid national assessment criteria risk bias unless they can flex to local contexts.

Finally, the entire evaluation system was itself scrutinized through a summative meta-evaluation, in which 16 senior vocational education administrators rated the assessment against the five Joint Committee on Standards for Educational Evaluation benchmarks: utility, feasibility, propriety, accuracy, and evaluation accountability. Utility, feasibility, propriety, and accuracy all rated high with high reliability, while accountability reached the highest possible band, though with moderate reliability. This two-layer approach, evaluating the evaluation, remains uncommon in educational competency research and gives the framework unusual credibility.

The practical implications extend well beyond Thailand. The study offers a template for any education system seeking to measure whether students can genuinely navigate sustainability transitions rather than merely recite sustainability concepts. The authors recommend that vocational policymakers adopt the nine-competency framework with regionally sensitive criteria, develop digital assessment tools delivering real-time personalized results, and create training materials, short films, and animations to lift the majority of students out of the middle band. They also acknowledge limitations: self-assessments may reflect socially desirable answers rather than actual behavior, and some items showed weak item-total correlations. Future work should incorporate field observations and longitudinal tracking. Still, as labor markets worldwide demand workers who can think strategically, tolerate ambiguity, and create value under uncertainty, this study provides a rare empirically validated answer to the question of how to measure those capacities at scale.

Subject of Research: Development and validation of an assessment framework for key sustainability transformation competencies among Thai vocational students

Article Title: Evaluation of key competencies for transformation towards sustainability in vocational students’ new normal era

Article References: Chianchana, C., Korakotjintanakarn, P., & Swangjang, S. (2026). Evaluation of key competencies for transformation towards sustainability in vocational students’ new normal era. Heliyon, 12(15), Article e45568. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.heliyon.2026.e45568

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: vocational education, sustainability transformation, competency assessment, education for sustainable development, psychometrics, factor analysis, situational judgment test, meta-evaluation, Thailand, new normal era, systems thinking, confirmatory factor analysis

The research team, led by Glenn Hunt and including collaborators from Myanmar and Europe, set out to document what they call the lived multifunctionality of these upland landscapes. Rather than measuring land-use performance solely through external metrics such as yields per hectare or carbon stocks, the researchers asked the people who inhabit and manage these landscapes how they perceive and value them. This methodological choice matters, because the gap between technocratic assessments and local understandings of sustainability has real consequences. In Myanmar, land that is managed under customary jhum cycles is frequently classified by the state as vacant, fallow, or degraded, a bureaucratic label that opens the door to appropriation, concession allocation, and forced conversion to other uses.

The fieldwork combined three complementary approaches. Participatory mapping sessions allowed villagers to draw and annotate the land-use mosaic of their territories, identifying jhum fields, forests, home gardens, terraced paddy fields, and other elements. Livelihood product inventories then catalogued the enormous range of goods that each land-use type contributes to household economies, from staple crops and wild vegetables to medicinal plants, fibers, fuelwood, and timber. Finally, community-based scoring exercises asked villagers to rate each land-use type against a set of locally defined functions, producing a quantitative picture of perceived multifunctionality that could be compared across villages and land-use categories.

The results were striking in their consistency. Jhum fields, the very land-use type most often maligned in policy discourse, emerged as the most multifunctional of all. They provided the widest range of livelihood products of any land use in the mosaic and contributed reliably to food security, the supply of medicines, the availability of construction materials, and the reproduction of cultural practices. This is not an accident of design but the product of a sophisticated management system. In jhum cultivation, plots are cleared, cultivated for a limited period, and then left to regenerate under fallow, a rotational cycle that maintains a dynamic patchwork of vegetation at different successional stages across the landscape. That patchwork, the study shows, is precisely what generates the breadth of products and services that communities depend upon.

Forests and home gardens play equally important, but complementary, roles. Forests supply wild foods, medicinal plants, and materials that jhum fields alone cannot provide, while home gardens close to the homestead support dietary diversity and generate income through the sale of vegetables, fruits, and small livestock. Terraced paddy fields, where they exist, contribute staple grain but occupy a narrower functional niche. The study emphasizes that none of these land-use types functions in isolation. Together they form an interdependent landscape mosaic in which households deliberately spread their livelihood activities across multiple land uses, reducing risk and buffering against crop failure, price shocks, and seasonal scarcity. This diversification strategy, refined over generations, is a hallmark of resilient upland livelihood systems across Southeast Asia.

The technical core of the study lies in its systematic comparison of perceived multifunctionality across land-use types. By aggregating community scores and product inventories, the researchers could demonstrate that the functional profile of jhum is not merely broad but also consistent: it contributes to nearly every valued function, even where other land uses outperform it on any single measure. Forests, for example, may supply more timber, and paddy fields more rice, but jhum fields deliver a balanced portfolio of contributions that underpins everyday subsistence. The authors argue that this portfolio logic is invisible to conventional land assessments, which typically evaluate each land-use type against a narrow set of agronomic or forestry indicators and therefore systematically undervalue rotational systems.

The policy implications are profound. In Myanmar, as in many other countries with significant upland Indigenous populations, state land classifications determine which areas can be titled, leased, or conserved. When jhum fallows are mapped as vacant or degraded land, the rotational cycle that sustains both livelihoods and regenerating vegetation is broken, and communities can lose access to the very landscapes that feed them. The study documents how this misrecognition is not simply a technical error but a clash between epistemologies: between a governance framework that reads landscapes through static land-cover categories, and an Indigenous understanding that reads them through lived relationships, seasonal cycles, and customary institutions. The authors frame this as a matter of epistemic justice, arguing that sustainability transformations cannot be inclusive if the knowledge systems of the people who manage the land are excluded from the categories used to govern it.

The findings also speak to a broader global debate. Shifting cultivation supports millions of people across the tropical uplands of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, and it has been the subject of contested narratives for more than a century. Colonial administrators condemned it, development programs have sought to replace it with sedentary agriculture, and some conservation initiatives have blamed it for deforestation. Yet a growing body of research suggests that, at appropriate fallow lengths and population densities, rotational systems can maintain biodiversity, soil fertility, and carbon stocks while sustaining livelihoods without external inputs. The Naga Hills study adds a crucial dimension to this literature by grounding the argument in the detailed perceptions of the communities themselves, showing that what outside observers see as degraded fallow is locally understood as a productive landscape in a necessary phase of renewal.

For the Naga communities of Layshi Township, the stakes are immediate. Their territories lie in a remote border region that has experienced conflict, restricted access, and limited state investment, making self-provisioned livelihoods all the more essential. The interdependence of jhum fields, forests, and gardens means that interventions targeting any single land-use type ripple through the whole system. Converting fallows to plantations, restricting forest access, or pushing paddy expansion onto sloping land each erodes a different strand of the livelihood web. The study’s participatory methods, by making local valuations explicit and comparable, offer a practical template for land-use planning that begins with recognition rather than replacement, and that treats villagers as experts on their own landscapes rather than as obstacles to development.

Ultimately, the research makes a case that extends well beyond the Naga Hills. If sustainability transformations are to succeed in the world’s upland regions, they must be built on an accurate understanding of how multifunctional landscapes actually work and on respect for the people who sustain them. Recognizing customary land-use systems such as jhum, the authors conclude, is critical not only for ecological sustainability but for more equitable development policy. The alternative, continuing to classify living, working landscapes as empty and degraded, risks destroying precisely the diversity and resilience that both local communities and the global community now urgently need to protect.

Subject of Research: Indigenous perceptions of the multifunctionality of shifting cultivation landscapes in the Naga Hills of Myanmar

Article Title: Lived multifunctionality: Indigenous perceptions of shifting cultivation landscapes in the Naga Hills of Myanmar

Article References: Hunt, G., Makury, A., Fogerite, J., von der Mühlen, M., Htet, A. S., Bastide, J., Heinimann, A., & Rueff, H. (2026). Lived multifunctionality: Indigenous perceptions of shifting cultivation landscapes in the Naga Hills of Myanmar. PLOS Sustainability and Transformation, 5(10), e0000288. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pstr.0000288

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pstr.0000288

Keywords: shifting cultivation, jhum, Naga Hills, Myanmar, indigenous knowledge, multifunctional landscapes, land governance, food security, epistemic justice, sustainability transformation, participatory mapping, upland livelihoods

The research team, led by Liam Ó Riada with Unai Pascual, Esther Turnhout and Julia Neidig, applied discourse analysis to the historical record of Spanish education policy. Discourse analysis, in this context, is a method for examining how language constructs reality: which concepts are elevated as self-evident truths, which are marginalized, and which actors are granted authority to define what education is for. Rather than treating policy texts as neutral descriptions of reform, the researchers read them as battlegrounds where different worldviews compete. This approach draws on political theory holding that dominant ideas are never permanent; they can be destabilized by crises and dislocations, creating openings for alternative visions to enter the mainstream.

The analysis identified three distinct periods in Spanish education policy. The first, spanning roughly 1975 to 1990, coincided with Spain’s transition to democracy after four decades of dictatorship. During this era, policy discourse was animated by emancipatory aspirations: education was framed as a vehicle for freedom, democratic citizenship and social justice. The legacy of authoritarian schooling made it politically urgent to imagine classrooms as spaces where critical thinking and participation could flourish. This period, the authors argue, contained genuine affinities with what scholars now call transformative sustainability education—an approach that emphasizes transdisciplinary learning, experiential and embodied pedagogies, and the capacity of learners to question and reshape the systems around them.

That emancipatory moment, however, did not last. From about 1990 to 2018, the study documents the consolidation of a neoliberal consensus in Spanish education policy, one heavily shaped by the discourse of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. The OECD and similar actors have long promoted a human-capital framing of education, in which schools are evaluated primarily by their contribution to economic competitiveness and employability. Under this logic, the purpose of education narrows to generating human capital: measurable skills that can be fed into labor markets. Standardized assessment, international rankings and performance indicators became the dominant instruments of governance, and the creative, critical and transdisciplinary pedagogies that sustainability transformation requires were progressively marginalized.

The technical heart of the study lies in showing how this economistic framing operated discursively. Human-capital discourse did not merely coexist with other visions of education; it absorbed and reinterpreted them. Even concepts with emancipatory origins, such as lifelong learning or educational quality, were redefined in market-oriented terms. The researchers describe this as a hegemonic process, in which one worldview achieves such dominance that its assumptions become common sense, rendering alternatives difficult even to articulate. For advocates of sustainability education, this meant that arguments about ecological crisis, social justice or intergenerational responsibility struggled to find legitimate space within a policy conversation organized around productivity and competitiveness.

The third period begins in 2019 and continues to the present, and it is here that the analysis becomes most striking. A sequence of dislocatory events—including large-scale student climate mobilizations, growing public awareness of ecological breakdown and political turbulence within Spain—destabilized the previously settled consensus. Sustainability emerged as a central signifier in education policy, culminating in a new education law that explicitly legitimizes transdisciplinary, experiential and embodied pedagogies. For the first time in the country’s democratic history, the legal architecture of Spanish schooling formally recognizes that learning for sustainability must go beyond transmitting facts about the environment and instead engage students in transformative, experience-based practice.

The authors are careful, however, not to declare victory. Their analysis shows that the discursive opening of the recent period remains constrained by entrenched neoliberal governance. The market-oriented logics built into assessment regimes, funding structures and institutional incentives did not disappear when sustainability entered the policy vocabulary. This creates a real risk of co-optation: the possibility that sustainability itself will be reframed as another form of human capital—a set of green skills for a green economy—rather than as an invitation to question the economic assumptions that drove ecological crisis in the first place. The study suggests that whether the current opening leads to genuine transformation or to a rebranded version of the old consensus depends on struggles still underway.

One of the most consequential findings concerns how change actually happens. The researchers found that dislocatory events alone are insufficient; what matters is whether different struggles for educational reform can be linked together into a broader coalition. When movements for climate action, pedagogical innovation and democratic schooling connect their demands, they can collectively push elements of transformative sustainability education into law and policy. Conversely, when reform efforts remain fragmented, the resilient machinery of market-oriented governance tends to absorb or dilute them. This insight travels well beyond Spain: it offers a strategic lesson for educators and policymakers in other countries navigating similar tensions between economic and ecological imperatives in their school systems.

The Spanish case also illustrates a broader tension in global sustainability politics. International organizations have increasingly embraced education as a tool for achieving the Sustainable Development Goals, yet the same institutions often promote the human-capital frameworks that the study identifies as a barrier to transformative pedagogy. The result is an ambivalence at the heart of international education policy: sustainability is celebrated in declarations while the governance instruments that shape classrooms daily continue to reward standardization and measurable economic outcomes. The Spanish experience shows that national politics can partially break from this pattern, but only when domestic coalitions are strong enough to translate crisis into legal and institutional change.

What emerges from this research is neither optimism nor fatalism, but a precise map of where leverage lies. The discursive history of Spanish education demonstrates that dominant framings are historically contingent rather than natural, that crises can crack them open, and that coalitions can push transformative visions into binding policy. At the same time, it warns that vocabulary is not victory: a law that mentions sustainability can still be implemented through competitive, market-driven governance that hollows out its meaning. For anyone concerned with how education systems might help societies navigate the ecological transition, the Spanish record offers both a warning and an invitation—the door to transformative education is open, but only sustained political struggle will keep it that way.

Subject of Research: Discourse analysis of Spanish education policy and openings for transformative sustainability education

Article Title: From generating human capital to transformative education: discursive struggles in Spanish education policy and openings for sustainability

Article References: Ó Riada, L., Pascual, U., Turnhout, E., & Neidig, J. (2026). From generating human capital to transformative education: discursive struggles in Spanish education policy and openings for sustainability. PLOS Sustainability and Transformation, 5(8), e0000267. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pstr.0000267

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pstr.0000267

Keywords: education policy, sustainability transformation, Spain, discourse analysis, human capital, OECD, neoliberalism, transformative education, climate crisis, pedagogy, PLOS, policy reform

The case for a paradigm shift rests on a candid audit of what came before. From 2000 to 2015, the Millennium Development Goals channeled global attention toward poverty and hunger reduction, and by that measure they delivered: more than one billion people were lifted out of extreme poverty during that period. Yet the same fifteen years saw an unprecedented exploitation of natural resources, as economic growth became the dominant, and often the only, metric of success. The SDGs that followed were meant to correct this imbalance by integrating seventeen interlocking goals covering everything from clean energy to life below water. In practice, the researchers argue, the framework has been undermined by the very structure intended to make it comprehensive. Governments, companies and institutions have cherry-picked the goals that suit them, treating the 169 targets as a menu rather than an integrated system, and progress on some goals has been offset by rising global inequality and continued biophysical degradation elsewhere.

The financing picture is equally stark. According to United Nations estimates cited in the analysis, the annual funding gap for achieving the SDGs stands at between 2.5 and 4.0 trillion US dollars, and it is widening, particularly in developing countries. The authors contend that neither the MDGs nor the SDGs proved compatible with the scale and complexity of intertwined social-ecological challenges, and that neither framework succeeded in mobilizing investment at anything close to the required magnitude, despite economic growth being positioned as the primary engine of change. A handful of transnational corporations, meanwhile, dominate the key sectors that link human and natural systems, concentrating both the power to cause harm and, potentially, the power to repair it. The SDG era, the paper concludes, will leave the world falling far short of essential social and biophysical targets, with the machinery of goal-setting intact but the systems it was meant to steer still spiraling in the wrong direction.

What would a regenerative alternative look like? The intellectual foundation is regenerative systems thinking, a perspective that treats today’s headline crises, including climate change, biodiversity loss and global inequity, not as separate problems to be solved one at a time but as symptoms of degenerative dynamics running through deeply interconnected systems. A regenerative system, in this framing, is one with an innate capacity to self-renew, provided it is managed well. The authors identify three paradigmatic changes that would distinguish RDGs from their predecessors. The first is breadth of domain: regenerative goals should span every sector in need of renewal, from agriculture and chemistry to education, health and economics, because interest in regeneration is already rising across civil society, business, politics and academia alike.

The second change concerns what development itself means. RDGs would foster thriving rather than growth, a shift from quantitative expansion to qualitative improvement. An economy oriented toward thriving, the authors suggest, would be characterized by low inequality and a strong focus on quality of life rather than the sheer quantity of economic transactions. Development, drawing on Amartya Sen’s capabilities tradition, is reframed as the striving for a world in which individuals and communities are free to exercise agency in shaping how they function within a larger context. Crucially, the thriving of all beings is understood as interconnected: one party’s flourishing should support the capabilities of others without curtailing their freedom to thrive. This is a deliberate inversion of trade-off thinking, in which one group’s gains are routinely financed by another group’s or another ecosystem’s losses.

The third and, in the authors’ view, most significant change lies in the very definition of a goal. Regeneration is an ongoing process, a sequence of interventions that converts degenerative dynamics into regenerative ones. Goal-setting under an RDG framework would therefore focus first on dismantling the feedback loops that cause degeneration and on supporting the feedback loops that lead to regeneration, including the enabling conditions that allow thriving within and across targeted domains. Fixed, absolute quantities, the staple of SDG target language, would take a back seat to the health of underlying system dynamics. Only once regenerative dynamics are established across multiple domains, the authors argue, does it become meaningful to set outcome-oriented targets with specific time horizons. The immediate priority is the transition itself: from degenerative to regenerative, just and life-supporting dynamics.

Skeptics might dismiss this as abstract philosophy, but the paper grounds the concept in concrete, operational examples across sectors that are typically considered irredeemably degenerative. Industrial agriculture degrades soils and erodes biodiversity, yet regenerative agriculture is rapidly emerging as an alternative that produces healthy dynamics across multiple interrelated domains. The Commonland Foundation, working in degraded landscapes around the world, has demonstrated that a holistic focus on landscape dynamics can yield simultaneous social, economic and natural returns, a pattern the researchers describe as benefits cascading through previously degraded agricultural terrain. The lesson is that restoration is not charity for nature; it is an investment whose returns compound across domains.

Chemistry offers a second, perhaps surprising, proving ground. Conventional chemistry is often degenerative in its reliance on finite feedstocks and persistent waste, but regenerative chemistry aims to build continuously self-renewing systems: raw materials treated as renewable and finite resources, energy used appropriately, and product degradability assessed with circularity in mind. One illustrative pathway uses biorefinery approaches to extract valuable bioactive compounds from non-edible agro-industrial residues such as citrus peel. By complexing these compounds with essential metals, researchers can produce green bio-based pesticides that support symbiotic food production cycles, turning an agricultural waste stream into an input for regenerative farming. The technical logic is circular by design: the output of one degenerative process becomes the substrate for a regenerative one.

The social sphere follows the same logic. Businesses can set themselves on regenerative pathways through inclusive workplace design, offering decent work, fair pay and supportive social relations that help reintegrate stigmatized and marginalized people into society. In such workplaces, tasks are crafted around people’s actual capabilities rather than hiring employees to fill predefined functions, and classical efficiency metrics are replaced by cultures that thrive on workforce diversity. The authors point to Greyston Bakery in the United States, Heyho in Germany and La Fageda in Spain as working examples. At the scale of whole economies, regeneration means minimizing waste, maximizing resource reuse and investing deliberately in natural, social and knowledge capital, the stocks that can grow even as non-renewable resources inevitably degrade. Direct trade models for commodities like coffee and cocoa illustrate the mechanism: by replacing exploitative relations premised on power asymmetries between the Global North and Global South with transparent, trust-based relationships between producers and consumers, social capital is built across the entire supply chain, and all economic actors come to share responsibility for the natural resources on which the activity ultimately depends.

What the authors call for next is a roadmap. They see an urgent need to identify concrete cross-sectoral regenerative dynamics that can inform post-2030 sustainability policy at national, regional and local levels. The SDGs were ratified on the assumption that breaking complex challenges into seventeen goals and 169 targets would deliver prosperity for all; the post-2030 agenda may retain similar or additional domains, but the decisive test will be whether identified pathways can instigate regenerative dynamics that span multiple domains in an ever more hyper-connected social-ecological context. The researchers frame the stakes in deliberately expansive language: as the world confronts, understands and mitigates the global polycrisis, the inevitable interactions across domains and scales could become the cornerstone of a global poly-opportunity, in which the same interconnection that spreads crisis also spreads renewal. Whether negotiators drafting the next generation of global goals embrace that inversion may determine whether the second half of the century is spent repairing spirals of decline or riding upward ones that benefit both people and nature.

Subject of Research: A proposed framework of Regenerative Development Goals to replace the Sustainable Development Goals in the post-2030 global sustainability agenda

Article Title: Regenerative Development Goals should shape the post-2030 sustainability agenda

Article References: Farny, S., Fischer, J., Zeidler, V. G. Z., Abson, D. J., & McElroy, C. (2026). Regenerative Development Goals should shape the post-2030 sustainability agenda. PLOS Sustainability and Transformation, 5(9), e0000285. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pstr.0000285

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pstr.0000285

Keywords: Regenerative Development Goals, Sustainable Development Goals, post-2030 agenda, planetary boundaries, regenerative agriculture, regenerative chemistry, inclusive workplaces, direct trade, polycrisis, systems thinking, global inequality, sustainability transformation

Sutoris defines social inertia as the patterned continuation of social trajectories shaped by historical pathways, embodied routines, institutional arrangements and cultural attachments. These trajectories can stabilise what communities value, including rhythms of work and learning, informal reciprocity, trusted routes and narrative attachments to place. But they can also carry exclusion, exploitation and violence. Reading persistence seriously, he argues, therefore forces an ethical question onto the research agenda: what is worth sustaining, and what would justify intervening? That question, he suggests, has been largely invisible in a field that treats continuity as a barrier to be dismantled.

The critique lands on an established vocabulary. Concepts such as carbon lock-in, path dependence, regime stability, behavioural inertia and institutional inertia all frame persistence as standing in the way of more sustainable futures. Carbon lock-in, for instance, explains how initial infrastructure choices generate increasing returns that foreclose alternatives. Regime stability describes the structural reproduction of socio-technical systems. Behavioural habit captures automatic individual responses to stable cues. Each is useful, Sutoris acknowledges, but each is mechanistic, and together they leave the cultural, embodied, narrative and political layers of persistence largely unexamined. Inertia has entered the literature as a black box: invoked to explain failure but rarely opened up.

The consequences of that thin treatment are visible across the policy landscape. Failed carbon-pricing schemes, local opposition to wind power, polarised reactions to low-traffic neighbourhoods and contentious renewable-energy negotiations on communal land are routinely explained through labels such as NIMBYism, populism or protectionism. Sutoris argues that these dynamics are more accurately read as encounters between interventions and the multi-layered patterning of community life: rhythms of care and labour, attachments to place, hard-won institutional accommodations and moral economies that outside planners misrecognise as friction. What appears from above as irrational resistance may, from within a community, be protective persistence.

To give the concept analytical teeth, the Perspective proposes a five-part typology. Institutional inertia covers the administrative routines, governance structures, legal frameworks and infrastructures that privilege continuity, the best-mapped dimension in existing research. Embodied inertia refers to the habits, affective attachments, mobility patterns and bodily rhythms that organise daily life in ways that outlive policy change, a dimension grounded in practice theory and the new mobilities paradigm. Narrative inertia captures the stories societies tell about themselves, about progress, identity, place and the human relationship with nature, which condition how interventions are received and whether they endure.

The fourth and fifth dimensions are the least theorised. Ritual inertia refers to the cultural practices and temporal rhythms that anchor meaning across generations; anthropology, memory studies and performance studies have long shown that ritualised practice carries memory through the body and generates attachment and belonging. Ethnoecological research further demonstrates that ritual and ceremony are knowledge systems in their own right, organising relations to land, season and community, relations that Indigenous scholarship frames through conceptions of time and kinship that dominant transitions vocabularies cannot accommodate. Infrapolitical inertia, drawing on the political science of James C. Scott, names the dispersed, low-visibility forms of persistence by which subordinate groups protect time, dignity and reciprocity under unequal power: foot-dragging, false compliance, dissimulation, the quiet encroachment of the ordinary. What looks like passivity from above, in other words, is often a strategic achievement.

Crucially, the five dimensions interlock. A bureaucratic routine may be sustained by the embodied competence of officials, legitimised by stories of orderly governance, reproduced through the periodic ceremonies of public administration and worked around by those it fails to serve. Reading any one dimension in isolation flattens persistence into simplistic accounts. The framework also opens space for thinking about multiple inertias at once: the continuity of a technocratic transformation regime, with its standardised metrics and infrastructural dependencies, is itself an inertia, distinct from and sometimes in tension with the patterned continuities of the everyday lives it seeks to remake. Sustainability transformations, Sutoris suggests, are shaped less by a single inertia to be overcome than by the interplay of several.

If inertia is to be read rather than removed, the methods of sustainability science need to change. Quantitative behavioural studies, integrated assessment models and systems modelling, the Perspective argues, are poorly equipped to read phenomena constituted in culture, meaning and power, a critique long voiced within the field itself. Sutoris proposes a methodological orientation drawn from the humanities and interpretive social sciences, spanning past, present and imagined futures. Reading archives against the grain means treating gaps, hesitations and silences in official records as evidence rather than absence; a renewable-energy project that produced no controversy in the public record may have generated extensive quiet adjustment in the affected community. Oral history recovers the embodied, narrative and ritual dimensions of past interventions through living memory. And Future Design, a deliberative method in which participants deliberate as members of a future generation, allows researchers to read which forms of continuity carry the moral weight of the imagined good life. All such methods must be participatory, he insists, because the patterns at stake are legible only to those who live them, and comparative designs across structurally contrasting settings are essential to understanding why a pilot succeeds in one place and stalls in another.

The reframing connects with several wider currents of critique. It gives practical analytical work to the long-standing call for interpretive social sciences and humanities in sustainability research; it supplies a structured vocabulary for the cultural and place-based turn in adaptation studies; and it engages directly with decolonising scholarship that accuses the field of dismissing Indigenous and Global South knowledge systems as obstructive. An inertia lens treats those continuities as forms of knowledge to be read for their moral and ecological commitments rather than engineered away, while also sharpening the political-economic critique of technocratic blueprint thinking. It complements, too, the relational literatures that ask what must change at the level of values, by asking what is already present in communities worth engaging rather than overwriting.

The stakes could hardly be higher. Sustainability research faces a mounting ecological crisis alongside eroding public trust in the institutions of transformation, and interventions designed to address climate change and biodiversity loss are repeatedly received as impositions by the communities whose ways of life they reorganise. Part of that failure, the Perspective argues, lies in misreading patterned persistence as opposition. The conceptual move Sutoris proposes changes the field’s diagnostic starting point. Instead of asking why change fails, researchers should ask what the patterning of continuity reveals about the lives interventions seek to alter, and how that knowledge should enter conversations about transformation. Persistence, on this reading, is not the opposite of transformation but one of its conditions, and learning to read it well may prove one of the most urgent tasks facing the field.

Subject of Research: A cross-disciplinary framework reconceptualising social inertia as patterned persistence to improve sustainability transformation research.

Article Title: Reading persistence: Social inertia as a cross-disciplinary framework for sustainability transformation

Article References: Sutoris, P. (2026). Reading persistence: Social inertia as a cross-disciplinary framework for sustainability transformation. Ambio. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13280-026-02480-1

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s13280-026-02480-1

Keywords: social inertia, sustainability transformation, patterned persistence, climate policy, carbon lock-in, practice theory, oral history, Future Design, decolonising research, community resistance, interpretive social science, Ambio