Research and education for desired transitions: a plot twist? A keynote by Der Loorbach at University:Future Festival 2024.
Economic and societal progress is powered by research and education. Academia informs policy and practice and educates the professionals that manage society. But we are facing existential crises: biodiversity loss and climate change, overconsumption, growing inequalities, decreasing access to health care, rise of populism and resistance and escalating geopolitical conflicts. Could it be that academia itself is the villain in this? Could it be that the way we research and educate is helping to cause these multiple crises? This is the story of how established structures and cultures that have worked so well in the past have now become barriers against real progress. But it is also the story of how heroes within and outside academia are paving the way and transforming academia. By critically reflecting on their own ‘regime, by engaging with social innovation, and collaboratively exploring and researching ecologically and socially desired futures. In doing so they break away from an individualistic, positivistic, linear knowledge system to one that is organic, normative and explorative. Slowly this movement is gaining speed and helping to build momentum in society and seize the transition moment. How this transition tale will end is ultimately up to us, but this presentation will provide the storyline, the transition theory and the practical tools and examples that will help you to write your own ending by doing it.
Derk Loorbach is director of DRIFT and Professor of Socio-economic Transitions at the Faculty of Social Science, both at Erasmus University Rotterdam. Derk is one of the founders of the transition management approach as new form of governance for sustainable development. He has over one hundred publications in this area and has been involved as an action researcher in numerous transition processes with government, business, civil society and science. He is a frequently invited keynote speaker in and outside Europe. In his spare time, you can find Derk on bass, on Twitter, or spending time with his family.
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Under the motto “Tales of Tomorrow“ the fourth edition of the University:Future Festival (U:FF) took place from 5 to 7 June. The U:FF is the largest event on the (digital) future of academic education. Topics include AI, future skills, didactics and strategy processes.
The U:FF 2024 was hybrid: the entire content of the programme could be fully experienced online. At the same time, stages in Berlin, Bochum, Heilbronn, Leipzig and Nuremberg allowed for on-site encounters. The programme was largely based on submissions from our communities. It was rounded off by outstanding VIP speakers. The festival was held bilingually in German and English.
Visitors enjoyed a varied and inspiring programme with over 300 contributions from more than 600 speakers!
The University:Future Festival 2024 was organised by the Hochschulforum Digitalisierung and the Stiftung Innovation in der Hochschullehre. It was supported by the Stifterverband. More info: https://festival.hfd.digital/en/
[Music] [Music] well there is plenty of challenges to pick from if you want to solve one may it be biodiversity may it be growing inequalities decreasing access to healthc care rise of populism wherever you want to become the hero of tomorrow’s Society yeah there’s plenty to choose from and of of course there’s policies to shape there’s business models to innovate Technologies to implement so the people universities shape will shape tomorrow’s Society the question is who needs to shape and how need universities how they how do they need to be shaped in order to really get the desired outcome um a society that thrives and is enable to solve these questions we’ll get some answers now hopefully by chokingly I would say so to say the the Dutch meire g d l um both of them actually met today at the festival here in backstage and had a very happy hello because I think they know each other for more than 10 years 15 years already I think 25 years when they were both in their early careers um of really becoming transformation researchers so to say we all know in which direction Maya gel went and those of you who do not know Derek he is now the director of drift the Dutch Research Institute for Transitions and he’s basically one of the founders of the transition management approach as a new form of governance for sustainable development so I’m very excited to have you on stage here with us to Enlighten us about your research and the very practical implications of it welcome Derek thank you D um I will speak English thank you for uh not going outside to have a dram drink in the sun I think I know it’s tempting and I’ll try to make it entertaining here uh for you at the at the end of this very exciting day I’m very happy to be here um I I hear so many different stories and perspectives uh that uh Empower me but also inspire me and I think it’s it’s well needed and and we should have something like this in the Netherlands I will um tell you a bit about my uh journey into transformation research indeed I I know Maya goo from 25 years ago which is also uh when we both started um uh basically using our professional career to try and change the world or better put uh to be part of the world that is changing I will uh start from um um uh my uh uh the left side of my identity which is director of an Institute which is is formerly a social Enterprise at arasmus University I was surprised to hear it come uh appear in in a presentation this afternoon it’s a university in Rotterdam it’s a very neoclassical Economic University with a business school uh famous for new public management it will come back in the story but it’s it’s basically a very traditional uh academic institution um we were in 2011 we were kicked out of the social sciences faculty for being undisciplined and normative uh which I think is what we have to do uh and I will get to that the uh second half of my presentation is about the uh transition experiment that we uh run me and colleagues the last four years to try and change this uh old-fashioned 20th century University into a modern one we failed but we learned a lot so um I’ll start here uh which is also uh the starting point of this transformation transition research and you know these figures probably they are about climate change and biodiversity loss that doesn’t really matter well it matters because we’re all going down but uh uh what fascinates us and me is that this is also an illustration of the failure of our knowledge system uh Education and Research so what is depicted here on this graph is the rising carbon emissions and plotted on it are all the uh Global policy agreements but you can replace that with all sorts of uh good intentions from policy makers businesses everything that is labeled sustainability you can plot on that graph and you can see the impact our University calls it positive societal impact um the basic starting point is we know all this and we know it for decades and somehow there is a problem with how we transfer knowledge into action whether it’s policy or whether it’s what we teach students that then end up in government institutions or uh uh businesses to uh do something it’s not working um but basically you could argue it’s unsustainability by Design that’s the global picture but this these are some pictures from rdam my city and and we see the same kind of pattern at the local scale I don’t know if you can relate to it but uh uh in some cases not rdam is below sea level we have a very fossilized Port it’s a a car based City there are huge social uh inequalities uh and these are all what we call persistent social problems we have a lot of researchers paying attention to it they these problems appear in educational programs uh uh the university works with uh policy makers we inform policy policy uses knowledge gets money uh from our taxes to then invest in these problems and it doesn’t change so this picture is about health inequalities in the dark red areas of the city people die on average 7 to 12 years before the Dutch average and this is figures that are consistent since we have been uh tracking the data so knowledge and policy is failing uh and I can I we call it unsustainability by Design there is sort of a historical uh um institutional pathway through which our educational and academic institutions have been built that has been designed to uh support a model of linear uh extractive and fossil growth it’s the model of modernization um especially successful in the postwar decades it created huge uh uh uh um economic growth but it also created all sorts of uh uh additional ecological and social problems and then uh when these problems were created through the implementation of Technologies or the models of economists then social scientists or environmental scientists come in and they study the problems and they come up with recommendations to make it better so we have environmental policies uh in the Netherlands um uh if you look at the figures our whole uh environment is polluted it’s full of plastic of PE uh of nitrogen um so much for environmental policies um an interesting squeeze is that uh uh so the starting point for us is to figure out how can this be that our academic system is uh continuing to just study these problems and then inform policy but it doesn’t really change um and at the same time it’s becoming more and more pressured by cutting budgets we now have a rightwing government in in uh the nland that has plans to cut budgets even more and one of their core points is that education should be politically neutral so they want to also get rid of all the uh professors like me for example uh that have an opinion or at least build uh base their work on actual science um in transitions research we use this concept to explain why it’s so hard to change um we built this this idea of a regime it comes from very different disciplines but it refers to this idea from social sciences structuration we are all living in a context that we co-created so um a regime is the shared way of thinking the shared structures and practices that humans develop in a way to to uh make life easy so every institution has a regime but also social syst systems have a regime so our Mobility regime or you can study the the waste regime the healthc care regime um or a university regime and over time it’s a regime is what makes life easy because you don’t have to do everything I had great food and drinks and this is organized because we have divided task and and uh formulated rules and regulations and this is how we behave uh i s I’m speaking here and you sitting over there listening so there Norms but also shared practices and routines but the concept attached to it is path dependency it’s very hard to escape from um these institutionalized ways of thinking doing and organizing um yet if we look from at complexity science but also historically um there are always moments in time when this path dependency is broken so the idea of transition is basically um the story that if something is unsustainable it cannot be sustained indefinitely think of the limits to growth um sooner or later it will be pushed out of equilibrium so in transition research to put it simply we know the context is changing digitalization aging population sustainability climate change uh globalization geopolitics so Society has to adapt to it uh um and the normal uh uh response because these regimes are so path dependent is that we absorb and we try to adapt and we try to improve and optimize but that gets harder and harder and we get more and more internal problems and tensions uh and that ultimately leads to a a a destabilization and a a feeling at least of chaos but in the worst case it can lead to collapse the uh other side of of the curve uh bottom left is that individuals are always able to find some Alternatives they’re always Pioneers also in ecology you always have new seats spreading you have variation and selection and out of those uh uh uh pioneering Alternatives new structures emerge so a transition is basically something that ecologists can study they call it tipping points uh or you can or historians study it afterwards you can describe transition from A to B from horses and carriages to cars for example um we try to apply this to study transitions in the making um and uh uh I had the discussion with Maya this morning about it uh we’ve always uh worked from knowing that we are heading as a society in this pattern so we don’t know where we are but inevitably this model of linear TR transfer of knowledge or linear fossil extractive growth will come to an end whether it’s climate collapse or social collapse or uh we find something better so our transition approach is try to use this juristic to uh organize conversations to create storylines um you can ask yourself okay where are we where am I in this figure won’t go in there uh but there’s increasing evidence that we are at least uh moving um from the left side towards the middle and and you see the polarization in Europe I don’t have to give a lot of examples but food is is a clear evidence on the one hand you have the farmers that resist in the meat industry uh this is a picture from the Nelons uh my sister’s in there I was uh a coward on the side of the road uh Extinction Rebellion uh pushing for FAL subsidies um what we see a lot is that we are in sort of a social process where we first have to go through the phase of of acknowledging the problem um and coming to terms with the fact that the way we’ve organized Society is actually the problem this growth orientation this linear uh model is failing um the next step is to conclude that it will also mean that we have to let go of stuff and that is something something that we don’t want as humans if we start to feel pain we Retreat or we listen to populists that promises that they can cure us or without any uh problem um if we fail and we uh uh uh then we end up in panic um what we focus on in in transitions is what is the potential because ultimately if we want to achieve a truly just and a sustainable Society we need uh we need to go through the pain it’s inevitable so let’s try to anticipate and see where the potential is of Alternatives and then uh uh um ultimately find a new narrative in society we call a transition pleasure where we uh see that it’s actually possible to build an economy that is truly just and sustainable and we’ve been working for very long time studying working with Pioneers in food we can have regenerative Food Systems we can have uh cities for wall walking and cycling we can have Renewable Energy Systems um the consequence is degrowth but our focus should be uh on expanding uh what is already possible so we call a transition agency it’s trying to look for those Pioneers that started to be a vegetarian in the ’90s OR experiment with solar panels 20 years ago um but also the ones that are more social entrepreneurial or social designer like uh they uh uh have already gone through the pain said goodbye and and are just trying to take small steps we say it’s radical thinking and diplomatic doing so um there’s much more you can read the whole Library uh but I want to uh spend the last part to explain how we try to apply this to our University regime I already told you rdam is a particular type of University um it’s built around disciplines it has a very a positivistic idea of what good science is it’s disciplinary you publish in in five top journals within your discipline it means you need to be objective and descriptive and empirical um and and from our perspective uh partially irrelevant so what we started to see especially irrelevant when it comes to uh helping to support these emerging processes of um uh uh sustainability transitions it’s perhaps even worse because from that attitude you keep describing and analyzing and improving the status quo and by definition are sort of part of the regime and our University it has 40,000 students it produces thousands of students trained in neoclassical economics uh in new public management that end up in offices that basically uh reinforce this PA dependency so what we uh um we got our hands on part of the strategy funding we had a vice Chancellor for two years only two years he he ran away but in those two years he managed to create an opening get U uh me and colleagues into the strategy against the will of a lot of people um and and we created this experiment where we said there must be all all sorts of indiv uals within this uh University regime that are also moving out that are experimenting that are looking for more transdisciplinary or transformative ways to do research education so can we create a platform to bring them together to empower each other uh to develop uh to hack the system in a way to introduce new uh programs um and and to uh uh uh basically be like a trojan horse uh and and uh transform the system from within uh so we formulated the hypothesis because transitions research is basically that you hypothesize that transitions will happen that there will be emergence of Alternatives there will be growth because the context will continue to change more and more people within the regime will will start to see the need and the urgency and if you sort of help Interlink those individuals then you can create a critical mass and the evidence and the transition pleasure that becomes like a positive magnet for others um so it it quickly expanded this just a picture from from last year because every year we had to uh uh uh renew the team part of the dominant logic of University’s temporary contracts um which is something in itself and uh um uh we just two days ago had the third did day so we organized yearly events and it this we created a narrative for ourselves saying okay we have to explore whether there’s indeed a university transition that we can think of so we the first year was about building the boat while sailing there was all sorts of network but we also had to figure out what is this kind of platform how to build a trojan horse basically the second year uh the The Narrative was we’re we’re trying to gather all sorts of stories uh images ideas about universities of the future it cannot be radical enough so why not just have no buildings but only palm trees or uh uh tree hugging uh hippies also there um and then the idea was in this process we create Community we create transition pleasure so the third year then we have convinced the regime and we will be dancing with the Deans well I can tell you uh I invited all of them individually uh half of them responded politely and the others uh didn’t respond at all so no Deans uh one of the colleagues that was involved in the design of the whole thing they said uh well at first you were dangerous but now you’re toxic um so in that sense we we uh uh uh didn’t succeed already to to hack the system U at the same time we we managed to do a lot of stuff that that might filter through and and emerge in in different ways I’m here I’ve also been invited in in a lot of other places um so what we often see is that this kind of stories they spread in a much more emergent and and organic way and I’m very happy to it so I I hope you can all also people watching this online connect to uh what we’ve done but also our our Network we’ve had a lot of uh conversation sessions working papers trying to come up with a narrative about what transforming Academia is about and a it resonates with a lot of individuals indeed perhaps even more individuals in other institution than our own what we also managed to do is we created a new master’s program uh we had a whole cluster of colleagues that work on transformative education so education should not only about knowledge transfer but about capacity building lot of stories I heard today about it as well so now you can actually study in the master program transitions there’s not knowledge in there complexity thinking and and we’ve sort of it’s a roller coaster uh uh that that the students go through uh facing complexity but also then sort of grounding again and and uh uh getting sort of more practical there’s a lot of potential for intervision and reflexivity and they end up uh uh not with a thesis but with an intervention so they do future workshops with Bankers or or the uh in two weeks they they occup occupy two parking places or uh they they work with a local community to uh uh introduce a Community Kitchen uh experiment on a circular boat so they just do things and and it’s also a good cure against Eco anxiety um what we’ve also done is is try to put an academic Foundation under this idea of transformative research um making the case against the dominant uh understanding of what good research is so according to us good research is actually academics that link up to social actors that try to change the system come up with Alternatives or destabilize it and try to uh bring research methods research thinking academic thinking distance U uh uh uh Independence to the social process of transformation but that is by definition normative and explorative and different but not necessarily L unscientific um so we managed we also attracted a lot of visiting researchers very happy that uh uh uh Barbara K Christina Bogner a lot of Germans by the way uh uh they came and they also experien the platform and the community that we were building as sort of a safe space and an open space uh to liberate uh the last one is on top is is uh the one that we just um uh shared Rachel Williams uh one of the research assistance but uh she’s a great promising young researcher I would say uh uh uh LED where basically we try to summarize what we’ve tried to do over the last four years which is try to think come up with an Institutional design for transformative academic work because that was the experiment um and we’ve identified a number of of Dimensions saying okay if we and there’s a huge amount of of literature already there ex examples how can we um uh design institutions to accommodate appreciate and support transformative academics it it requires a context of care of co-creation uh of empowerment of experimentation and it has implications for how you design curricula how you um reward and recognize uh researchers the the types of roles that you have have in teams not only academic functions but also designers or mediators or facilitators and and uh um so in this working paper uh we summarize and Sy synthesize what’s what’s been said in the in the literature um why I said in the beginning it failed because the intent also from the pre previous Vice Chancellor was is take four years to build the critical mass and the evidence and the argumentation help us to establish a new school or Institute um and that is not happening we uh have to cut budgets at the University and the leadership says well um we’re going to start a new process um so the positive societal impact is basically uh proven to be a bit of a hollow uh term I’m going to end up because then we have some time for questions I hope um I I for me it’s not a debate but but uh academics that that suggest that they are neutral um are fooling themselves but it’s also dangerous um because we’re all humans we all have backgrounds we all have biases and I think uh uh in Academia we should have a reflexive and engaged uh uh uh culture um and there are a lot of structures and cultures uh established uh in my University but in a lot of others that that prevent that and I think we need to work really hard as a community uh uh to open that up and I see a lot of good examples at institutions but it needs uh much more of a a collaborative effort uh and and I hope that our experiment has contributed but I of also inspired you to uh take all your good efforts a bit further in a collective way the coming years thank you for listening thanks a lot Derek we do have time in for questions yes and while chill gets ready with the microphone you can already put your hands up so we know where there are some questions maybe in that corner maybe over there raise your hand and in the meanwhile now it really seems like a tasking job like you mentioned um all the Deans thought you went from unpleasant to toxic the government wants to slash your funds so do you need to think about sort of like subversive gorilla ways of really getting your science and all your practical implications across yeah yeah but that’s that’s sort of a normal condition that working on transitions is also going against the current uh because you’re trying to explore Pathways that that are not yet paved um I think we were also a bit naive thinking that we could change the whole institution in three years I I maybe we didn’t really believe it but but I I think that we got excited by the promise of it and the potential of it and um one thing for example we did manage to do is we um brought together intellectual leadership from all the different schools we have seven different schools like law business and on um established professors and we collectively wrote A Vision piece that is very uh outspoken and articulate um and it opened up conversations within all the schools uh followed up by sessions um sustainability dialogues we call them and they will we will have the sustainability Summit in September you’re all invited where we bring together try to do something like this um so we’re we’re still have this Grassroots infiltration going um it’s just the the the frustration that I feel that it could go much faster if the formal leadership was gutsy enough uh to decide for it and and that’s uh but fortunately that’s that yeah it’s difficult is it something that’s only like you know Annoying from your perspective or does it also sort of like create some frustration from all specifically all the younger people in there who probably went in there with the hopes of being able to change something and then running into this wall might also create a reverse effect I I I I under underestimated personally a number of things so one is we we tried to create this nice a safe space Community but in the end we were also forced to have people on temporary contracts because uh we had to comply with the university uh rules and we uh should have maybe not uh but that also and and it it it it was nice to experiment but if you’re established it’s it’s easier to experiment uh you have less to lose or you have maybe more experience to to to give stability so I think internally it it it created for the young people we invited also a bit of vulnerability that that uh I certainly uh should have prevented maybe or been aware of more the other thing is that we also have academics that are really emotional that University is now saying we we we stop it the the we we’re not continuing it because it allowed them to have like this playing space one or two days in the week on a sment to find likeminded academics and to to experiment and they now feel oh we have to go go back into the cage um so these are two examples of that’s always an inherent risk in Innovative projects that people once experienced it they rarely want to go back into the structure as they were working in before yeah it’s so it’s also dangerous what you open up at the same time I think it’s also part of the the the pain and and we have to see so I’m committed to continuing this in in one way or another we have to see how that plays out be creative is there a quick question in the audience raise your hand we have a microphone if oh there is one chill are you ready with the microphone quickly we only have 60 seconds left sorry for long answers no hell from I would be interested in how do you do the upscaling process because we have all these Lighthouse experimental cross functional teams which I’m a very big fan of the trojen horse to reform the system from within but how do you upscale how do you create acceptance and commitment of all the little kingdoms and team 40,000 students and so on so what what I tried to explain is that we designed the experiment not with scaling with but with diffusion in mind so the secondments the conversation with the thought leaders uh the dialogues the Workshops the working papers the did days it’s community building with people that are in the schools in our case teachers and they bring ideas into uh their educational programs conversation within the schools so that’s the infiltration part the other part is the institutionalization uh uh uh side so for example what um uh we have a big push on sustainability in education so there there’s now working group on uh um uh creating a course for all students obligatory to uh uh uh do sustainability or the master program um but our our sort of biggest trophy was to create some kind of permanence uh for this kind of a space so either a faculty like structure or an Institute with the same kind of power uh as a dean of another school um so that you could also have impact professors or impact career tracks in transformative research or transformative teaching uh an exam board that understands that programs need to be assessed not on thesis but on Intervention and so on and that’s we’re not there yet but but I think we’ve SE it a lot so uh I’m not done yet so the goal is to establish your sort of work and then be able to figure out how to scale it from that security unfortunately we have to wrap it up here um with the session to be able to prepare the next session but thanks so much for joining us traveling all the way here thank you for having me thanks a lot yes thank you