Transformation
Every transformation has a middle.
The middle is where it gets lost.
The other views on this page ask whether a system will shift. This one starts after that question is settled — when the old arrangement is already coming apart, the new one does not exist yet, and nobody can say which of several futures is being built. That gap has a name in the research literature: the in-between. It is short, it is loud, and a great deal is decided in it.
Scroll — the landscape runs from the past on your left to the futures on your right
Preparing the system for change
One cup, one ball
Here is the picture you have already met twice on this site. A system sits in a basin. Push it, and it rolls back. How hard you can push before it stops rolling back is its resilience — and for most of what we care about, resilience is the good news.
It stops being good news the moment the system in the basin is the problem. Then the same stability that protected a forest from drought protects a fossil economy from reform, and every attempt to move it is met by the shape of the ground.
Preparing the system for change
But there is never only one way out
This is the paper's first correction to the familiar diagram, and it changes what the picture is for. A transformation is usually drawn as a move from one basin to a better one. In practice the ground ahead holds several basins, competing, most of them latent — and not all of them are somewhere you would choose to go.
- BSustainability and justice. The one this work is trying to reach. It has to be built; it is not waiting at the bottom of the hill.
- CA deliberate turn backwards. Built on purpose by actors who are simultaneously dismantling whatever would make B possible.
- DBreakdown. Nobody argues for it. Some will accept it over B. The ground slopes that way on its own.
The authors are firm that these letters are a heuristic, not a census: there is no single cup A, B or C, because there is no single transformation or system — only many, plural versions and realities.
Navigating the transition
Standing on the ridge
The ball is out of the old basin and in none of the new ones. Rules that used to hold no longer hold; the ones that will replace them have not been written. Uncertainty is at its maximum, and so is the number of futures still genuinely available.
This is where the article puts its whole attention, and the reason is unsentimental: a system in flux is a system that can be pushed. Everything that follows is about what happens to a transformation when somebody pushes.
Navigating the transition
Three kinds of backlash
Backlash is not the same thing as opposition, and the paper is careful about the difference. Ordinary resistance is part of how change happens — it tests ideas and shifts power. Backlash is something else: a retrograde aim, an extraordinary challenge to what is being built, and enough reach to become mainstream. The authors identify three sources, and they want different things.
- 1
Those losing out in the unmaking
People already poorly served by the current system who nonetheless stand to lose a job, a role, a place or an identity as it is dismantled. Left unattended, the paper argues, that grievance becomes available to whoever is building the turn backwards.
- 2
Those building the turn backwards
Actors deliberately constructing a different basin while dismantling what would make a sustainable and just one possible — democratic backsliding, funded disinformation, the dehumanising of opponents.
- 3
Incumbents defending what is
Those protecting the status quo and resisting both the phase-out and the building of alternatives — and who, forced to choose, will take breakdown over a sustainable and just system.
Watch the ground while you read. Cups C and D are deepening, and the route to B is closing.
Navigating the transition
Now you hold the three capacities
Every arrow in the paper's Figure 2 is a control below. Backlash stays at full strength — these are a response to something, and turning the pressure off would make them look stronger than anyone claims they are. Drag them in order and you walk through the argument.
The paper gives no equations, and neither does this. The direction of each effect is taken from the section that argues for it; the magnitudes are chosen so the landscape reads on a screen. It is an illustration you can operate, not a model of politics.
Stabilizing the new system
Arriving is not the same as staying
A ball that has reached the new basin is not finished. The three capacities are not a gate you pass through; they are the reason the basin has walls at all. Stop grieving what ended, stop holding the space, stop making the future imaginable, and the ground relaxes back toward the shapes that were there before.
The page's own physics makes the point plainly: a ball sitting safely in a sustainable and just future, with nothing maintaining it, slides into breakdown once backlash is at full strength. That is not a metaphor added for effect — it is what the terrain does, and the test suite fails if it stops doing it.
Stabilizing the new system
The other half of the picture
A landscape shows you where you might end up. It cannot show you that the ending and the beginning have to happen together — that phasing out the old system and building the new one are one process, not two, and that doing only the first is how you get breakdown rather than transformation.
That is what the X-curve is for. One trajectory descends as the incumbent system comes apart. The other rises as an alternative is assembled. They cross in the transition, which is the ring — the in-between, where this page has spent all its time.
Hover or focus any point for what it means. After Olsson et al. (2026), Figure 1c.
What this asks of us
The useful thing about this framing is that it refuses two comfortable stories at once. It does not say a good future is inevitable if we push hard enough, and it does not say backlash is an irresistible tide. It says the ground has several basins, that some of them are being dug on purpose, and that which one we end up in depends on capacities we can actually build.
Those capacities are unglamorous and mostly relational: letting go of things well, sitting with people who do not agree with you, and keeping a believable alternative in view. The paper's closing move is worth repeating — these are not solutions that will magically resolve backlash, and treating them that way would underestimate the struggle, the time and the contention that transformations involve. They are what keeps the option open.
After Olsson, P., Moore, M.-L., Søgaard Jørgensen, P. & Folke, C. (2026), “Facing backlash and derailment risks: building capacities for navigating transformations to sustainability and justice in turbulent times,” Global Sustainability 9, e36. doi:10.1017/sus.2026.10072. Published open access under CC BY 4.0. The landscape and the X-curve here are original renderings after the paper's Figures 1b, 1c and 2.