3.4.2. Contributions to Sustainability Transitions

The multipronged, light-touch, utilization-focused evaluation tool embeds the perspectives of participants regarding notions of sustainability transitions. A key part of this perspective entails a social practice orientation that prompts evaluators to look at the ways in which an intervention shifts practices (e.g., norms, values, rules and materials). Scalability (out/across/deep) and systems approaches that connect across sustainability domains and scales were other evaluative areas in the impacts tier. Surprisingly, despite the small scale of the interventions in the cohort who codeveloped the evaluation framework, the interviewees expressed deep interest in this most abstract and long-term level of evaluation, and this was, to some extent, reflected in their plans and actions. Indeed, the desire to form and join a learning community reflected a desire to magnify and deepen sustainability impacts. Following the analytical framework developed here, which calls attention to the need for social learning processes that feature dialogue, reflexivity and innovation as well as coproduction efforts reflecting as broad a diversity of views, knowledges and experience as possible, the effort to form a learning community might be enhanced by embedding these elements.
