Political administrations’ staff bears a special responsibility for shaping socio-ecological transformations: They play a key role at the framing and implementation of national, European and international policy. Simultaneously, actors of public administration are confronted with perpetually complex problems, occurring transitions processes and (new) challenges, they need to respond suitably to. Compared to other problems, however, transformations are neither predictable nor calculable. Instead, they call for an agile working mode and specific competencies. 

This is the entry point of the Refoplan-research project “Daring Transformation” (duration 2017-2021) led by Klaus Jacob and Julia Teebken from the FFU, and Caroline Paulick-Thiel from Politics for Tomorrow (P4T). In interchange with staff from environmental administrations and an extensive partner network, the team iteratively designed, executed and evaluated a training program (the “transformation workshop”). The so developed transformation workshop in essence deals with building a transformative literacy for successfully shaping and accompanying social transformations. 

In the period of May 2020 to January 2021, staff members of the Federal Environmental Ministry (BMU), the Federal Environmental Agency (UBA), and the Federal Agency for the Safety of Nuclear Disposal (BASE) attended the program. The staff members contributed crucially to the huge response to the program’s first draft: Their knowledge and experiences were essential to understand the conditions of the involved organizations and elicit the long-term consolidation of transformative literacy. After its conduction, the transformation workshop was evaluated systematically. All results are available in the now published project’s final report. 

In a succeeding project, the transformation workshop is supposed to be prepared for dissemination and adoption to other ministries and authorities. Further information can be accessed on the project website: https://www.transformationenwagen.de/.