In line with the increasing calls for more transformative and transgressive learning in the context of sustainability studies, this article explores how encounters between different ontologies can lead to socio-ecological sustainability. With the dominant one-world universe increasingly being questioned by those who advocate the existence of many worlds—a so-called pluriverse—there lays the possibility of not only imagining other human–nature realities, but also engaging with them in practice. Moving towards an understanding of what happens when a multiplicity of worlds encounter one another, however, entails a sensitivity to the negotiations between often competing ontologies—or ontological politics. Based on an ethnographic methodology and narrative methods, data were collected from two consecutive intercultural gatherings called El Llamado de la Montaña (The Call of the Mountain), which take place for five days every year in different parts of Colombia. By actively participating in these gatherings of multiplicity, which address complex socio-ecological challenges such as food sovereignty and defence of territory, results show how encounters between different ontologies can result in transformative and potentially transgressive learning in terms of disrupting stubborn routines, norms and hegemonic powers which tend to accelerate unsustainability. Although we argue that a fundamental part of the wicked sustainability puzzle lies in supporting more relational ontologies, we note that such learning environments also lead to conflicts through inflexibility and (ab)use of power which must be addressed if sustained socio-ecological learning is to take place.

This paper provides a Latin American perspective on ESD, with a focus on transformative and participatory learning in community contexts. With a long history of critical pedagogies, Latin America provides a fertile ground for exploring alternative forms of education as a means to address deep-rooted challenges in western traditional strands of education. We start by providing an overview of pertinent educational currents present in Latin America, then ground these perspectives in two case studies carried out by the authors – one from Colombia, the other from Brazil – which explore grassroots initiatives in community settings that utilise different forms of education and learning. We then propose an integrative model to foster alternative educational approaches that might lead to decolonial and regenerative praxis, finishing with a discussion on how Latin American-rooted regenerative decolonisation perspective and praxis can inform global ESD discourses.

This paper addresses the call for more action-based narratives of grassroot resistance to runaway climate change. At a time when deep changes in society are needed in order to respond to climate change and related sustainability issues, there are calls for greater connectivity between science and society, and for more inclusive and disruptive forms of knowledge creation and engagement. The contention of this paper is that the forces and structures that create a disconnect between science and society must be ‘transgressed’. This paper introduces a concept of Transgressive Action Research as a methodological innovation that enables the co-creation of counter hegemonic pathways towards sustainability. Through the method of the Living Spiral Framework, fieldwork reflexions from the Colombian case study of the international T-Learning project were elicited, uncovering and explicating the transgressive learning qualities needed to respond to climate change. As part of a larger action–research project, this paper combines the arts with the social sciences, demonstrating how the concept of ‘Transgressive Action Research’ can enable co-researchers to engage in disruptive and transformative processes, meeting the need for more radical approaches to addressing the urgent challenges of climate change.

This empirical paper addresses the need for more in depth understanding of signs and characteristics of transgressive learning in a context of runaway climate change. In a world characterized by systemic global dysfunction, there is an urgency to foster rapid systemic change which can steer our paths towards meeting the SDG goals. The contention of this paper is that, although there is a need for rapid change, it is fundamental to understand how such change can come about, so as to co-create and investigate learning environments and forms of learning that can lead to a systemic change towards sustainability. Anchored in the emerging concept of transgressive learning, this article employs the innovative Living Spiral model to track critical learning moments by facilitators and participants in multi-stakeholder Transformation Labs (T-Labs), which took place in 2017/2018 in various grassroots sustainability initiatives in Colombia and The Netherlands. The results of the analysis highlight the importance of the values of “acknowledging uncertainty”, “community”, and “relationality” in disrupting world-views through promoting reflexivity in participants and facilitators. This paper concludes that more research on the power dynamics of “absences” in transformative research is needed to better capture the challenges of overcoming sustainability challenges.

In times of global systemic dysfunction, there is an increasing need to bridge higher education with community-based learning environments so as to generate locally relevant responses towards sustainability challenges. This can be achieved by creating and supporting so-called learning ecologies that blend informal community-based forms of learning with more formal learning found in higher education environments. The objective of this paper is to explore the levers and barriers for connecting the above forms of learning through the theory and practice of an educational approach that fully engages the heart (feelings), head (thinking), and hands (doing). First, we present the development of an educational approach called Koru, based on a methodology of transgressive action research. Second, we critically analyze how this approach was put into practice through a community-learning course on responsible tourism held in Colombia. Results show that ICT, relations to place, and intercultural communication acted as levers toward bridging forms of learning between participants, but addressing underlying power structures between participants need more attention for educational boundaries to be genuinely transgressed.