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The scale and urgency of sustainability problems the world over has led to calls for sustainability transformations in cities, regions, and countries. Such calls for transformation are underlain by a persistent knowledge-to-action gap between scientific knowledge production, policy, and practice. To rise to the challenges of sustainability and resilience, municipal administrators need to set evidence-based and ambitious sustainability targets and develop strategies to achieve them. Simultaneously, transdisciplinary sustainability science researchers need to generate scientific knowledge to further enable cities along pathways of transformation. This paper details a collaborative backcasting game, AudaCITY, developed to build transformative capacity in city administrations while also generating deep contextual knowledge to inform a transformative sustainability science research agenda. We present AudaCITY's key features, potential applications and adaptations, and exemplary outputs and outcomes for cities and researchers. We conclude with recommendations for adopting and adapting AudaCITY for use in action-oriented and transformational sustainability science and capacity building.
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This content will become publicly available on April 1, 2026
Transforming takes a village plus a willingness to break down barriers and learn: An event history study of transformation and resilience in critical infrastructure
As critical infrastructure systems consider whether and how to adapt and build resilience to climate variability and change, more research is needed to holistically explore the dynamics of resilience-building changes over time. We begin to fill this gap with a case study of the Rhode Island public wastewater sector. The Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management has invested significant funding, technical assistance, capacity building, and regulatory pressure to help publicly owned wastewater systems build resilience to climate challenges since 2010. To trace, assess, and understand the dynamics of resilience-building efforts over time, we interviewed wastewater utility and municipal personnel using event history calendars (EHCs). EHCs helped respondents recall details of relevant events, including potentially disruptive storms/incidents, and how they responded, including large- and small-scale adaptations, during the study period (2010–2023). We used EHCs to trace resilience and transformation capacities over time, and to analyze and predict movement toward transformational adaptation. We found that factors that best enable movement from incremental to transformational changes include unlocking capacity, or the organizational cultural value of in-depth learning/change, and a suite of contextual supports – new information, forward-looking collaborators, and stable funding sources – which require buy-in across levels of governance. We also found that, with organizational culture considered, experiencing disruption is not predictive of pursuing transformative adaptation. This suggests decision-making strategies for states, local jurisdictions, and utility managers to support climate adaptation and resilience in critical infrastructure, such as eliminating path-dependencies and silos, lowering thresholds for action, and leveraging networks to support moving toward transformation.
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- PAR ID:
- 10581916
- Publisher / Repository:
- Elsevier
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Journal of Environmental Management
- Volume:
- 380
- Issue:
- C
- ISSN:
- 0301-4797
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 124980
- Subject(s) / Keyword(s):
- Climate change adaptation Critical infrastructure Organizational learning Resilience Transformational change Wastewater management
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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