Despite an increasing number of scholars and practitioners engaging with diverse actor groups to co-produce knowledge, we need to better understand how we can purposefully design and facilitate these processes to support taking action to move towards more sustainable futures.

To contribute to a better understanding of the drivers and mechanisms behind successful knowledge co-production, this oral presentation focuses on how a careful and deliberate design helps dialogue-based processes achieve their intended outcomes. We structured a dialogue process around systems, target, and operational knowledge as the conceptualization and guiding framework for understanding and addressing sustainability problems in complex social-ecological systems. Different complementary activities invited actors to look at these problems through multiple lenses and reflect on their own positions, perspectives, knowledge, and values.

Through a carefully designed and documented workshop series on Öland, Sweden, as our empirical case study, we trace how actors’ perceptions of problems and solutions changed during three sequential and aggregative workshops. We also demonstrate how we moved from exploring the multifunctionality of landscapes and understanding actors’ different values, preferences, and priorities, to developing four strategies for effectively accelerating and expanding adaptation efforts. We reveal how the process of mobilizing, articulating, and connecting individually held systems, target, and operational knowledge nurtures collective action.

We believe that insights on how a careful and deliberate design helps dialogue-based processes achieve their intended outcomes would be of timely interest and relevance to attendants of the International Transdisciplinarity Conference 2024. With a detailed account of the different sequential phases and complementary activities of our workshop series, we provide guidance for other scholars, practitioners, and policymakers, who wish to engage a variety of actors in addressing sustainability challenges in inclusive and equitable ways.

Landscapes, understood as a manifestation of the action and interaction of natural and human factors (Council of Europe, 2000), form an important basis for high quality of life and are considered an important resource for humankind. Climate change significantly impacts landscapes and the services they provide. This paper argues that, due to their inherently relatable and tangible characteristics, landscapes support creating common visions, collaboratively identifying pathways towards these and participatory solution-orientated experimentation.

To support our argument, we present the concept and some initial findings of the transdisciplinary research project “Climate change – landscapes: designing sustainable futures (KLANG)”, which investigates the development and use of participatory landscape scenarios focussed on climate change in transformative regional processes towards sustainable development. Within KLANG, local landscape scenarios in the form of landscape visualisations and stories of landscape change are being developed in a transdisciplinary process involving local stakeholders and scientists in three case study regions in Switzerland. Embedded in a co-design process, these scenarios are being specifically tailored to contribute to ongoing future-oriented processes in the regions, such as devising strategies and actions for climate-resilient regional development, planning adaptation and mitigation measures, incorporating climate change into landscape management policies or devising regional energy strategies.

By combining visualisations and storytelling, we (1) strive to facilitate the integration of local knowledge on the landscape system, including regional identity, with scientific knowledge on the impacts of climate change, adaptation and mitigation strategies. In working at the local landscape scale, we (2) aim to contribute to the audience-orientated climate change communication and, in doing so, enable stakeholders to forge connections between the global phenomenon of climate change and everyday life, identity and personal scope of action. By using futuring techniques, our goal is to (3) foster a solution-oriented mindset and allow individuals, regional stakeholder groups and decision-makers to discover options to influence future landscape development under climate change.

Overall, this transdisciplinary social learning process aims to collaboratively envision solutions to real-world problems at the landscape level and empower those involved to actively shape the(ir) future.

Council of Europe. (2000). Council of Europe Landscape Convention as amended by the 2016 Protocol (European Treaty Series No. 176). https://rm.coe.int/16807b6bc7

The inherent complexity of sustainability challenges calls for the collaboration among scientific disciplines and between science and society to co-create knowledge and solutions. Inter- and transdisciplinary (ITD) research methods and tools have gained significant attention as a means to bridge disciplinary boundaries and foster collaboration within research processes aiming for societal impact. However, organizing impact-driven ITD research programs remains a challenge, due to the complexity of the sustainability problems and the need of integrating different types of knowledge and disciplines. One tool often employed in ITD research is the Theory of Change (ToC). Traditionally used for ex-post impact evaluation, a ToC has the potential to guide the design of impact-driven ITD programs, yet its application in this context is relatively unexplored. This paper illustrates and reflects on the process of collaboratively designing an ITD research program using a ToC, thus contributing to the theory and practice of ITD research. The ToC approach was implemented in the Joint Research Program of the Dutch and Flemish drinking water sector for the period 2024-2029. The drinking water sector increasingly faces societal responsibilities encompassing a broad range of interconnected sustainability challenges associated with drinking water production. In response, Dutch water utilities and one Flemish utility have been transitioning towards more impact-oriented research. In 2021, a two-year co-creation process involving ITD researchers, program managers and water utility professionals was initiated to redesign the Joint Research Program, which undergoes renewal every six years. The result of the process is a program ToC with short and long-term outcomes and pathways to 7 types of impact (health; environmental; economic; scientific and technological; political; social and cultural; and educational) that inform the identification of the program’s research themes and research lines. In our presentation, we will illustrate the iterative co-creation process, reflect on its challenges and lessons learned, and discuss future developments for monitoring and evaluation of the program. In so doing, we present a comprehensive approach to using ToC, how it can contribute to impact-driven ITD research, and the process of fostering impact-awareness among researchers and professionals.