Places to intervene in a socio‐ecological system: A blueprint for transformational change

Abstract

The scientific community and many intergovernmental organizations are now calling for transformational change to the prevailing socioeconomic systems, to solve global environmental problems, and to achieve sustainable development. Leverage point frameworks that could facilitate such transformative system change have been created and are in use, but major issues remain. Scholars use the leverage point term in multiple contradicting ways, often confusing it with system outcomes or specific interventions. Accordingly, the underlying structural causes of unsustainability have received insufficient consideration in the proposed actions for transformational change. In this work, I address these issues by clarifying the definition for leverage points and by integrating them into a new blueprint for transformational change, with clarified structure and clearly defined transformational change terminology. I then theoretically demonstrate how the nine phases of the blueprint could be applied to both plan and implement transformational change in a socio‐ecological system. Although the blueprint is designed to be applied for socio‐ecological systems at national and international scales, it could also be applied to plan and implement transformational change in various sub‐systems.