There is growing debate on the need for transformational approaches to tackle the challenges facing development in the face of climate change. If current incremental approaches to preventing dangerous climate change and adapting to the change we are already locked into are insufficient, then more radical approaches may be required.
This briefing paper summarises research designed to create a set of characteristics of transformation that can help guide the development of policies and programmes to tackle climate change. It combined a documentary analysis of academic literature on transformation from diverse fields with interviews with climate change and development experts.
It concludes that whilst it is a term that is increasingly used, ‘transformation’ remains an elastic term and forms part of the rapidly changing lexicon of terms to describe development responses to climate change. Despite concerns that transformation was the latest buzzword, the research concludes that it has considerable value in underpinning the idea of radical change as a necessary condition to tackle climate change. The research also argues that the term is being employed exclusively with a positive value, with little attention to ‘negative transformation’. Nevertheless, this research summary provides the initial basis for further conceptual understanding of transformation on which to anchor operational guidance in the context of climate change and development.