How transdisciplinary processes and stakeholder engagement can help to sustainably shape global futures

Covid-19 is just adding to the portfolio of greatest challenges our society faces presently and in future. Such complex ill-defined problems affect the whole human-environment system and require both big picture thinking and focused perspectives to be better understood. Here, the question of who decides on global futures, and how, becomes a key issue. I argue that collaboration-based system understanding needs to be the basis for any form of future-oriented development strategy and, particularly, the generation of supportive interventions and innovations. Approaches of science-practice collaboration such as transdisciplinarity which aim at stakeholder engagement open a wide range of possibilities for knowledge integration. Embedded in system understanding, the identification of vulnerability spaces (e.g., agro-food chain, digital ecosystems, rural communities) and their transformation into innovation niches becomes a key success-factor. This can be considered as a crucial aspect in transformative learning. But are we fit for those challenges and do we, as universities, provide the appropriate learning environments and competences and what would the implications of a transdisciplinary learning environment be? In tackling those issues, highly relevant show cases from food security and digital transformation will provide insights regarding the design of the underlying knowledge systems and -processes.