The World in 2050 (TWI2050) seeks to frame the solution space for sustainable development pathways, based on comprehensively achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by 2030 and sustaining progress to 2050 and beyond within planetary boundaries. To this end TWI2050 is to provide fact-based knowledge to support the policy process and implementation of the 2030 Agenda and beyond. In a first step, it aims to address the full spectrum of transformational challenges related to achieving the 17 SDGs in an integrated manner so as to minimize potential conflicts among them and reap the benefits of potential synergies of achieving them in unison. The SDGs set out very clear and ambitious global goals across social, economic and environmental areas with important interactions between and among these goals (e.g., between energy and climate, between food security and ecosystems, etc.). What is lacking, but urgently required, is an assessment of the viability of achieving these multiple social-economic-environmental-planetary goals simultaneously using integrative and systemic methodological approaches. The German Development Institute / Deutsches Institut für Entwicklungspolitik (DIE) and SDSN Germany contribute to this process. Societal and political change is a necessary precondition for the transformation to a sustainable world in 2050.

Societal transformation takes time and implies inter alia incremental as well as disruptive change of political institutions in multi-level governance and societal values and attitudes. We thus need to understand better which patterns, mechanisms and trajectories lead to societal and political change (path dependencies; lock ins; incremental versus radical change; disruptions) as well as governance arrangements conducive towards sustainable development. This workshop of the TWI2050 governance working group thus focuses on theories of social and political change that can inform scenario-building. It seeks to identify explanatory factors and drivers of societal change from different disciplines.