Governing Sustainability Transformations

The 2024 WCSG conference focuses on addressing multiple, interconnected sustainability crises such as climate change, biodiversity loss, pollution, global public health threats, and socio-environmental inequality. These crises call for a transformation of society and sustainability governance, requiring a reordering of current systems to drive change toward novel and sustainable systems.
The central question of the conference will be whether sustainability transformation can be governed, and if so, by whom, how, and through what means. Four main themes will be explored to answer this question:

1. Defining transformative sustainability change
2. Actors and just transformations
3. Governance approaches in and for transformations
4. Evaluating sustainable transformations

IIASA researchers Elliott Woodhouse and Chris Wong from the Equity and Justice (EQU) Research Group will conduct a social simulation exercise as an innovative session at the WCSG conference. A social simulation is a collaborative process to allow participants to engage with complex problems that have multiple framings in a game design that emulates the real world. The simulation will be designed to be open ended so that participants can explore different strategies and pathways and the challenges that exist to their desired futures, based on the RAINFOREST Project draft pathways.