What is the Pathways Initiative?
The collective journey toward sustainability is complex. Starting points are diverse and trajectories are multiple. The Science-based Pathways for Sustainability Initiative aims to be an inclusive and integrative response to the pressing need to produce knowledge and understanding in systemic interactions, competing development agendas, and transformations in concrete contexts. Through the development of a Pathways Community of Practice (CoP), the initiative ambitions to build understanding of:
- How interactions at various scales in complex human-environment systems produce trade-offs or synergies within a context of competing development agendas and claims on resources;
- How transformations can be mobilized to enable expansion of integrated pathways to sustainability in diverse concrete contexts;
- How pathways and processes of transformation, which are likely to differ between places given differences in histories, contexts and values, interact across locations and scales, creating both tensions and synergies, and ‘add up’ to outcomes at the regional and global levels.