What is the Pathways Initiative?

The collective journey toward sustainability is complex. Starting points are diverse and trajectories are multiple. The Science-based Pathways for Sustainability Initiative aims to be an inclusive and integrative response to the pressing need to produce knowledge and understanding in systemic interactions, competing development agendas, and transformations in concrete contexts. Through the development of a Pathways Community of Practice (CoP), the initiative ambitions to build understanding of:

  1. How interactions at various scales in complex human-environment systems produce trade-offs or synergies within a context of competing development agendas and claims on resources;
  2. How transformations can be mobilized to enable expansion of integrated pathways to sustainability in diverse concrete contexts;
  3. How pathways and processes of transformation, which are likely to differ between places given differences in histories, contexts and values, interact across locations and scales, creating both tensions and synergies, and ‘add up’ to outcomes at the regional and global levels.

Pathways’ Community of Practice (CoP)

The initiative supports the development of an open Community of Practice (CoP), convening researchers from diverse disciplines who engage with societal actors (e.g. civil society, governments, private sector) in processes of adaptive learning to design, implement and evaluate pathways to sustainability. Such processes are key to meeting the pressing challenges of advancing Agenda 2030 and better understand the diversity of values that shape visions for desirable futures in different places, the processes that lead to transformations, as well as the uncertainties, trade-offs and co-benefits that can emerge from the interconnections between sustainable development goals at various scales. The development of the CoP relies on a series of collaborative activities (networking, capacity building, reflective practice, synthesis events and tools) targeted at fostering and supporting these learning processes. The initiative also promotes the CoP’s work and outcomes with the goal to showcase the ways science engages with societal actors to contribute to transformations, from shaping our understanding of the problems to the design, implementation and evaluation of pathways to sustainability.

Rationale behind the Pathways Initiative

The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), adopted in 2015, aim to provide a common, integrated global framework for peace and prosperity for people and the planet, now and into the future. Although the 2030 Agenda presents SDGs independently, it highlights that they are indivisible and emphasizes the importance of understanding and acting upon the complex spatial and temporal interactions that exist between SDGs and the need to ensure that progress made in some sectors or countries does not hinder progress in others.

In 2019, the Global Sustainable Development Report (GSDR) reviewed progress on Agenda 2030 and further articulated the fundamental role of science in advancing knowledge-based transformations to sustainable development. Emphasizing that dominant research modes are not enough to guide the societal transformations needed to achieve the 2030 Agenda, the GSDR laid out a framework for researchers, practitioners, decisionmakers, funders and civil society to work together to achieve “universally acceptable and mutually beneficial sustainability science,” and identified the urgent need to produce knowledge and understanding in three key areas: systemic interactions, competing development agendas, and transformations in concrete contexts (Messerli et al., 2019).