Higher education institutions play an important role in the transition processes to sustainable development through developing critical thinking (CT) in their students. The case of the Research Methodology course of the International Cooperation Master’s degree at the Universitat Politècnica de València is a paradigmatic case of experiential learning, where students face their own realities related to sustainable topics through an action research project with the Agroecological Market (AM). The learning methodology is project-based learning and helps the participants to deeply analyze problems related to the transition of socio-technical systems, such as sustainable food. The objective of this research was to analyze the contribution of project-based learning to students’ critical thinking through a qualitative analysis of the pedagogical outputs obtained during the course. The analysis and results are structured in three dimensions of critical thinking: (i) students’ critical attitude towards reality; (ii) students’ ability to reason and analyze in order to form their own rigorous judgments; and (iii) students’ capacity to construct and deconstruct their own experiences and meanings. The results show that project-based learning using a real-life scenario helped students reflect on their critical thinking and the challenges that our societies face for a transition to sustainability.

Urban transformation towards sustainability requires deep systemic change in economic, social, environmental, cultural, organisational, governmental, and physical terms. Considering this challenge, this paper aims to explore the potentials and limitations of urban planning to incorporate an urban transition management approach that strives to enable such deep transformation processes.Taking the Integrated Sustainable Urban Development (ISUD) Strategy for district regeneration in Valencia (Spain) as a case study, the analysis and discussion elaborate on the main barriers and enablers for urban planning to incorporate a transition perspective when tackling urban sustainability challenges. Four main fields of tension emerge as particularly relevant: 1) Democratic representation versus involvement of forerunner innovators, 2) Formal decision-making procedures versus reflexivity and social learning, 3) Standardised project formats versus open processes of searching and experimentation, and 4) Fragmented policy agendas and budget lines versus integrated and multi-sectoral interventions.The case study illustrates how urban planning struggles to align its rationale with requirements for managing complex sustainability transformations. The findings point to a paradox inherent in planning for transformation: although urban planning necessarily incorporates the values and rules of the currently dominant urban systems, it also has the potential to create windows of opportunity for niche innovations to emerge at district or even city level. Therefore, urban planning processes form an arena in which conflicts between niches and regimes are negotiated.

Family farmers and grassroots innovations can enable transitions to more sustainable food systems. The study explores the roles umbrella farmers’ organizations play in building transformative capacity through grassroots innovations in rural food systems in Guatemala. An analytical framework based on the notion of transformative capacity and socio-technical transitions is used to explore the specific factors enabling and limiting the transformative potential of grassroots innovations in a rural setting. A case study in rural Huehuetenango, Guatemala is presented, using interviews and focus groups discussions with relevant stakeholders engaged in the development process. Perceptions from interviews and focus groups discussions highlight the catalyst role played by the umbrella farmers’ organization as the main enabling factor to increase transformative capacity of grassroots innovations. The umbrella organization plays a key role in enabling farmers to pursue socio-technical transformations and in moving grassroots innovations outside a niche sphere. It contributes to creating coherence towards a common sustainability vision, supporting innovation and experimentation, and providing technical assistance around core development processes. In addition, it navigates across different levels of agency (households, communities, networks, and institutions) and different interaction scales (local, department, and national). However, gender and multi-generational gaps have been identified as limiting factors that would require further analysis.