Introduction and Conceptual Framing-Transformation Literacy as a Future-Making Skill

Abstract

This chapter introduces the term transformation literacy as an urgently required skill for decision-makers and change agents. It suggests that transformation literacy is the knowledge and capacity of collectives of individual and institutional actors to steward sustainability transformations effectively together across institutions, societal sectors and nations. This includes the human capacity to collectively identify and shift dysfunctional patterns of societal and human-to-nature interaction at local and global scales. The chapter summarizes why transformation efforts are needed to not only achieve the vision of a sustainable world at all scales, but also to charter pathways towards regenerative civilizations. It briefly analyses the current failing systems and suggests that there is a need to build societal structures and institutional systems that have systems aliveness as its core value. It explores the role of future narratives of emergency, which currently dominate the discourse around the climate crisis, and narratives of emergence that are increasingly used in the niches of pioneering new approaches to regenerative civilizations. The chapter suggests to deepen knowledge and practice in the three levels of transformation literacy: mindset shifts, systems understanding and process competence. It concludes with an overview how these three levels of transformation literacy inform the three parts of the book.