At the 2015 United Nations Sustainable Development Summit in New York, world leaders responded to alarming scientific evidence showing that we humans are interfering with the Earth system at a scale and magnitude that threatens our own survival. With the adoption of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and its 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), they reconfirmed the primacy of sustainability as the guiding development paradigm (UN, 2015). Framed in the so-called “Brundtland Report” [1] and endorsed at the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio, the sustainability paradigm is not novel; and looking back, it has fallen short of expectations in various ways. Nevertheless it continues to be the official global response to the development and climate crisis of the Anthropocene. But—and this is confirmed by the renewed global commitment—science and society must urgently find ways to unlock its potential and organize a sustainability transformation [2].

The Post-Brundtland world is characterized by confusion, contestations, and arbitrariness in identifying the nature and pathways of sustainable development [3, 4, 5]. The implications of the sustainability paradigm as an antithesis to the paradigm of growth and transfer are not easy to capture. Although our understanding of development intervention and global governance has fundamentally changed [6, 7, 8], the normativity and the transformative power of sustainability have reached buzzword status [9]. At the same time, unorthodox scholars across diverse fields in science, technology, and development, have observed narrow, exploitative, and often destructive use of promising post-Rio development concepts such as innovation [10, 11], gender mainstreaming [12], livelihoods [13, 14], justice [15], or transformation [16], to mention just a few. Scholars argue that systemic thinking, equity-based science-society interaction, and reflexive learning – which are all indispensable in generating knowledge and innovation for sustainable development—continue to be marginalized, confined to single sectors, and used to serve vested interests [17, 18, 19]. Despite progress on the integration of civil society in global environmental assessments and negotiations, power disparities and self-interest are hampering action and creating new tensions, disparities, and bargaining between the global North and South [20, 21, 22, 23]. While economic bias gets much of the attention in the debate, sustainability scholars also criticize frequent environmental bias at the expense of human and social issues [4], and social bias. The latter prevailed in the Millennium Development Goals, for example [24]. Spangenberg ([18] p. 277) points out a damaging “trend towards a further fragmentation of research concerning the substance of sustainability”. Skoglund and Jensen ([22] p. 124) provide a striking example of how climate policy is misguided; they refer to Chandler (2012), who showed “how different policies and non-governmental organizations rely on the `adaptation agenda' to suggest survival strategies for the poor: thus attempting to align the marginalized with `vulnerability to climate change', instead of addressing the broader economic and social factors that gave rise to their marginalized position”. Such examples illustrate how concrete efforts and successes fade in an amalgam of overlapping and often contradictory approaches and discourses ranging from mainstream sustainability to green radicalism [25], or from weak sustainability to more radical constructions of strong sustainability [4, 26, 27]. As a consequence, the pre-Brundtland paradigm of growth, with its “loading-dock approach” [28] of transferring scientific and technological solutions to decision-makers, is persisting [29, 30]. To break its dominance and unlock transformative potentials, sustainability advocates have begun to reclaim the emancipatory power inherent in the original conceptualizations of development in their respective disciplines and practical domains. Taking systems approaches, they strive for epistemological and practical grounding as well as for further clarification of the interfaces between diverse development concepts (see, for example, [9, 10, 11, 19, 31, 32, 33, 34]).

This leads to the approach I take in this paper. My overarching question is: How can science contribute to a sustainability transformation? More specifically, I reflect on various aspects that are essential in organizing transformative research. I argue that an emancipatory and democratic construction of sustainable development is pivotal in tackling sustainability challenges. An emerging sustainability science is providing growing evidence of this fact. I further underpin my argument with experiences gained in the Eastern and Southern Africa Partnership Programme—a rare case of a long-term transdisciplinary research endeavour already completed. With my contribution, I intend to confirm that, if taken as the principal frame of reference, sustainable development is suited to integrate the efforts of sustainability-oriented scholars and practitioners across different profiles. It provides orientation in synchronizing development agendas and frameworks towards societal co-production of knowledge and innovation. Accordingly, the sustainability paradigm has the power to guide development and innovation policy and practice out of the current confusion and ineffectiveness.

Fortunately, we can build on promising achievements in transformative research. A multitude of reviews and syntheses show how an emerging sustainability science community is establishing considerable consensus on the sustainability paradigm's epistemological and practical implications for science and research (see, for example, [8, 16, 18, 22, 27, 29, 35]). With a view to promoting equity-based, just development within the planetary boundaries, scholars are working to identify enabling institutional contexts and developing transdisciplinary research frameworks and procedures across scientific disciplines and at the interfaces between science and society, as well as between science and policy [32, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40]. They conceive of sustainability as a societal future forming process [5], as it “emerges as a horizon to be approached but never reached” ([42] p. 992). Accordingly, transdisciplinary theory and practice must accommodate pluralism and experimentation. But, as Waas and colleagues ([4] p. 1645) point out, this future forming process has to be benchmarked against the “precise and unambiguous meaning” of the original conceptualization of sustainable development. They identify four fundamental principles—normativity, equity, integration, and dynamism—that “represent the interpretational limits of the concept and are essential to sustainability no matter which view and interpretation is employed” ([4] p. 1657). Such (and analogous) principles respond to the complexity and adaptiveness of human–environment systems—which are the subject under consideration [33, 43]—and provide orientation for societal future forming processes and “research in a world of flux” ([5] p. 11). Ethical and equity concerns further underpin sustainable development as an emancipatory and transformative concept and open the floor for contesting existing power structures and decision-making processes [16, 26, 44]. Not only natural resources but also social capital and knowledge must be distributed equally [23, 45, 46, 47]. This requires us to rethink our understanding of knowledge and expertise, and to revise our traditional role and (self-)conception as researchers [41, 48, 49]. Normative, democratic and procedural principles are at the core of transdisciplinary practice, in which scholars attempt to link science and civil society in joint reflexive or learning processes [17, 18, 26, 38, 40]. Building on such critical reflection, sustainability scholars are bringing together long-standing participatory, democratic, and social movements' traditions and structuring research along new, deliberate forms of science–society interaction [51, 52, 53, 54]. In a deliberative democracy, or indeed in any deliberative system, actors participate in a communicative process and influence collective decisions [25, 55]. If we understand a research framework or programme as a deliberative system, its deliberative capacity—“the extent to which a political system possesses structures to host deliberation that is authentic, inclusive, and consequential” [51]—gains utmost importance. But the deliberative capacity of individuals and institutions involved must likewise be secured for their equal and meaningful inclusion in future forming processes. As well as putting equity and power issues to the fore, this undergirds the strategic goal framed by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization to develop knowledge societies by democratizing knowledge and knowledge generation [56]. Indeed, progress in the democratization of knowledge has been observed [57], and sustainability science is making headway. But transdisciplinarity is a relatively young field, and experiences of long-term transdisciplinary practice at a transnational, regional scale are particularly rare.

In the following, I will present the Eastern and Southern Africa Partnership Programme (ESAPP) as a research endeavour that is well-suited to help fill this gap. Running from 1999 to 2015, the programme brought together partners from Switzerland, Kenya, Ethiopia, Tanzania, Madagascar, Mozambique, and Eritrea in conducting long-term transdisciplinary research for sustainable land management and sustainable regional development. Two final publications provide substantial insights into this experience. Ehrensperger and colleagues present ESAPP's research and outcomes [58], while Ott and Kiteme [59] provide more in-depth reflections on the implementation, adaptation, and learning processes that took place within ESAPP. Taking up the arguments outlined above, I present programme features that proved to be supportive in strengthening deliberative capacity, equity-based knowledge generation, and institutional development for coherent local to global governance. I further discuss specific challenges that arose during the implementation of this transdisciplinary and transnational research programme as well as in securing its legacy.

When ESAPP was framed in the late 1990s, both public involvement and sustainability science were in their infancy. Ott and Kiteme [58] show how three contextual developments at the interface between science and policymaking had prepared the ground for ESAPP's unique and innovative programme design: First, decades of research collaborations and networking between Switzerland and countries in Eastern Africa had established trust and fruitful interaction between scientists, funding organizations, as well as governmental and non-governmental actors and institutions of the countries involved. This led to the launching of an integrative research programme that matched the scientific and political landscape of Eastern Africa. Second, since 1988, ESAPP's mother institution, the University of Bern's Centre for Development and Environment (CDE), had been mandated by the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC) to help prepare Switzerland's position on the 1992 Rio conventions and translate them into poverty alleviation policy and practice. Already in the 1990s, CDE had come up with integrative, participatory concepts and tools designed to support human agency, science–society interaction, and social learning [59]. Third, the programme designers could build on long-standing activities of a loose network of sustainability-oriented scholars and practitioners in Switzerland. In 1997, representatives from CDE and the Swiss Academy of Sciences and its Commission for Research Partnerships with Developing Countries (KFPE) drafted the KFPE's 11 Principles and 7 Questions as a guide for transdisciplinary and transnational research partnerships for sustainable development [44, 60]. The KFPE guide is heavily equity-oriented and reflects state-of-the-art sustainability science even today. It underpins the choice of sustainable development, partnership, and transdisciplinarity as ESAPP's core foundations. The well-established collaboration between scientists, practitioners, and policymakers enabled SDC as the funding institution to give ESAPP's architects considerable leeway; at the same time, SDC was represented on ESAPP's advisory board—the programme's steering committee—from the outset. Such long-standing and trustful collaboration between researchers, funding organisations, and research users in the North and South, must be considered a precondition for transformative research [58].

ESAPP was launched in 1999 with the mission of generating new knowledge and innovation for sustainable development on local to regional levels. The programme was aimed at mitigating sustainability challenges by making knowledge generation more democratic and accessible, increasing Southern ownership and agency, producing innovative research results, and promoting evidence-based, South-driven sustainable rural development. Transdisciplinarity as the second epistemological pillar of ESAPP was understood as an integrative approach that brings together scientific (disciplinary and interdisciplinary) and non-scientific (endogenous, indigenous, cultural, local, etc.) knowledge systems; academic, social, and political actors and institutions; and different places and scales [51, 61]. This approach would guide science and society through research and learning processes in which they needed to jointly produce three types of knowledge: systems knowledge, which delineates the sustainability problem to be addressed and the associated subsystem or context (“What is?”); target knowledge, which encompasses negotiated values and goals for a shared vision of a sustainable future (“What ought to be?”); and transformation knowledge, which describes the path to follow in order to achieve a sustainable future (“How do we get there?”) [39, 52, 60]. In such an understanding, knowledge and innovation for sustainable development are necessarily an outcome of joint learning processes that involve all societal actors. Accordingly, ESAPP framed research for sustainable development as what Gergen [5] has called a future forming practice. The programme constituted itself as a communicative space [54, 62] embedded in an open framework of research partnerships. ESAPP's developers further acknowledged that partnership as a third epistemological pillar required special attention. In North–South research partnerships, disparities with regard to power, knowledge, and resources often constrain balanced exchange and cooperation, as the research is generally financed, initiated, managed, and evaluated by Northern institutions [63]. In a network as complex as ESAPP's, this calls for efforts to expand deliberative capacity, for a devolution of power, and for ensuring accountability and legitimacy towards both funding organizations and partners within and beyond the research network [8, 39]. It requires management strategies and organizational structures that promote Southern partners' determination, competence, and ownership with respect to the formulation of pathways to sustainable development [43, 56]. And this, in turn, calls for pragmatism [3, 64]. Pursuing equity as a structural goal within ESAPP was both fundamental and innovative.

Another central conceptual element in ESAPP was its thematic and spatial concentration. In line with CDE’s core competence, ESAPP focused on contextualized knowledge about sustainable land management and sustainable regional development and promoted local and regional initiatives through transdisciplinary research. Knowledge has to be generated and processed together with local actors to be robustly coupled to human-environment-system dynamics in a specific context [33, 64, 65]. In the African context, a vast majority of people depend on direct access to renewable natural resources, while competing claims and short-term needs at various scales tend to override environmental concerns, aggravate poverty, and inhibit economic development [66]. The result is a dwindling resource base, which often goes unnoticed for a long time. The programme’s stewardship of the environment does not constitute a case of the environmental bias observed by Waas and colleagues [4]; it is a necessity. After many decades of neglect, rural areas and the livelihoods of small-scale resource users are now being reappraised based on the recognition that global governance approaches, adaptation and mitigation strategies must build on knowledge of local conditions to be effective [21, 67].

ESAPP’s designers were well aware that the programme's transdisciplinary and transnational research framework opened up a door to many new challenges. One of these challenges is the dual role of scientists doing transformative research: they must work to provide evidence while simultaneously expanding human and institutional capacity for sustainable development by means of education and training, collaborative research and learning processes, as well as knowledge brokering activities and products [30, 50, 53, 63]. How then should inter- and transdisciplinary research be (re-)organized and structured? A sophisticated research framework is provided by the Earth System Governance Project, which organizes research around five analytical problems: architecture, agency, adaptiveness, accountability, and allocation & access. At the same time power, knowledge, norms, and scale are regarded as crosscutting research themes that are crucial to the study of each analytical problem and also to an integrated understanding of earth system governance. Related thematic issues are embedded in flagship activities [37]. This research framework outlines, in a very useful way, the basic challenge of coherently integrating facts and values in a transdisciplinary research programme [37, 47]. In ESAPP, conceptual and operational challenges or necessary trade-offs at the science–policy interface were addressed by combining the open partnership and research framework with recursive and (self-)reflexive processes that the project partners steered jointly [39]. Three structural approaches provided the necessary guidance (see also [58]):

Being at once consistent, integrative, and flexible, ESAPP's three structural approaches secured an institutional arrangement that was ideally suited for enhancing deliberative capacity, learning, and institutional development. In what follows, I will provide some insight into how indeed, they fostered equity and inclusion, the co-production of contextualized knowledge, and the development of people's and institutions' capacities, in the South and North (see also [58]).

As argued above, in order to support a sustainability transformation, scientists need to strengthen the deliberative capacity of research— understood as a political system—by means of adequate structures and procedures. Adequacy in this context means that they are in line with the fundamental normative, democratic and procedural principles of sustainable development. It is in collaborative and reflexive processes that partners in research share and integrate values, norms, and perceptions, tackle dissent, and create a “common culture”. This shifts the focus from research outcomes to the processes of social knowledge generation; to experimentation, learning, and constant change under an adaptive governance approach [30, 53, 62]. The “communicative space”—actual or virtual meeting places—and the deliberate and consequential quality of exchange become a subject of analysis: Where do researchers, partners, and actors interact, and what exactly are they doing there? But first of all, people need to be brought together. For the ESAPP as a transnational research programme, this was not only a logistical problem. Organizing joint processes among partners with different cultural backgrounds and varying institutional strength requires time, resources, and mutual trust. Over the years, ESAPP partners successfully organized an iterative process of reflection and adaptation within routine modes and places of exchange. The following elements and milestones of partners' interaction were crucial to this success: