Inspiring sustainable futures
There is an ever-widening gap between the growing calls for sustainable development and the frustrating reality of humanity’s slow progress – even regression, in some cases. Stark reminders of the challenges we face appear in the media with increasing urgency: accelerating biodiversity decline, rising climate-induced disasters, persistent poverty and inequalities, and declining social cohesion driven in part by resurgent nationalism. All these crises underscore the pressing need for evidence-informed, targeted actions in response.
With our 2025–2028 strategy, we reaffirm our commitment to pioneering innovative scientific approaches that generate high-quality knowledge – knowledge that informs public discourse, fosters social innovation, explores change, strengthens collaborations, and creates space for impactful transformations. While our new strategy may build on previous achievements, it also takes our work in fresh, innovative directions. And it reflects our commitment to critically assessing our theory of change and pathways to impact, learning from our partnerships, and continuously improving the effectiveness of our work.
Our approach to transformations
Theory of change
CDE’s approach to sustainability transformations is based on transformative and transformation research and education. Our theory of change systematically outlines our strategic aims; our ompetencies in support of sustainability transformations according to four impact areas: sustainable land systems, just economies and human well-being, sustainability governance, and transformative education and science (section 3); and our unique approach to fostering transformations, rooted in clear hypotheses and articulated according to five generic pathways to impact. Finally, it consolidates our learnings about key supports and constraints of transformative research and education.
What we do
CDE spearheads, inspires, and supports sustainability transformations by making contributions in four impact areas: just economies and human well-being, sustainable land systems, sustainability governance, and transformative education and science. Notably, sustainability governance and transformative education and science are simultaneously impact areas and levers that can be used to enable progress towards sustainable land systems and just economies and human well-being.
Just economies and human well-being
Human well-being as a multidimensional concept includes human needs, material and immaterial living conditions, relations to nature, fairness, social participation, and cultural identity. Achieving it in combination with a healthy planet requires addressing complex social, economic, and ecological challenges and rethinking concepts of prosperity and quality of life. To investigate how societies can thrive within planetary boundaries, work in this impact area focuses on social–ecological interactions and sustainable livelihoods. It emphasizes justice and equity while considering the uneven impacts of globalization and the urgent need for fair distribution of resources.
Sustainable land systems
Land is critical to achieving multiple, often competing, development priorities. Land use significantly impacts ecological resilience, people’s livelihoods, and our ability to tackle the challenges articulated in the 2030 Agenda. In this impact area, we promote inclusive transformative change towards sustainable land systems. In our research and outreach activities, we address the complexity of land claims from global to local scales, including underlying ecosystem services and integrated landscape management perspectives.
Sustainability governance
CDE’s work addresses the urgent need for governance arrangements that promote sustainable practices and discourage unsustainable ones. This involves understanding and influencing the processes of rule-making and norm development as well as appraising the role of informal and customary institutions. It incorporates activities of both public and private actors and their complex interactions across various scales from the local to the transnational. CDE researchers evaluate the impact and effectiveness of current governance strategies, including associated power dynamics, in diverse contexts worldwide.
Transformative education and science
Science and higher education must resonate with real-world contexts and collaborate with societal stakeholders in order to support transformation towards sustainable development. This requires us to reshape science and education, enabling a stronger focus on tools for change agency such as transformative literacy, sustainability literacy, and diverse formats for co-producing knowledge. Together with its regional partners and members of the University of Bern, CDE provides vibrant learning spaces for transformation. As an academic centre of excellence, CDE also explores institutional and policy change in higher education and science.
What we promote
CDE spearheads transformative and transformation research and education to support sustainable development. Achieving impact depends on many context-specific dynamics, external factors, and the interests and power of different actor groups. To contribute to sustainability transformations, we work according to five pathways to impact. They rest on hypotheses about mechanisms of change. Each pathway is tailored to the particular regional contexts and research settings we work in.
Our pathways to impact in brief:
- Knowledge-informed decision-making: where CDE’s research creates scientifically valid, socially robust knowledge that informs actions and decision-making processes.
- Transformative literacy: where CDE’s work enhances the ability of individuals and societies to access, interpret, and utilize information about societal transformation, and to get constructively involved in these processes.
- Institutional work: where CDE helps to create strategies, rules, and norms for collective action to take root, and to transform competing interests and sustainability trade-offs into widely supported sustainability pathways.
- Social and technological innovations: where CDE’s engagement contributes to innovation of social practices and greater consistency between technological development and human needs.
- Partnerships in regions: where CDE’s anchoring in five world regions resonates with local priorities, fosters meaningful connections, and contributes to contextually sound sustainability solutions to bridge local realities and global debates.
What we aim for
Guided by the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and building on the knowledge, approaches, and tools from our four impact areas, we are committed to work on five overarching development objectives for this new strategy period. These five objectives are key to driving urgently needed transformations towards sustainable development. We therefore promote contributions to:
- Ecosystem regeneration for sustainable livelihoods
- Sustainable food systems and land investments
- Just and resource-light economies
- Institutions for sustainability
- Competencies for sustainability transformations