Vulnerable sectors of the population living in poverty in developing countries are highly dependent on renewable natural resources for their livelihoods and daily lives. Sustainable resource management, improving the well-being of vulnerable people, and building resilience to shocks are global challenges. This study analyzed the outcomes of various autonomous innovations by the people themselves and the enablers of these innovations in the communities of developing countries. This analysis of 20 autonomous innovations from six countries revealed that these innovations produced outcomes that simultaneously improved multiple indicators of human well-being, including “basic materials for a good life”, “safety”, “health”, and “good social relations”. The process of promoting public values, such as education, health improvement, and landscape conservation as a by-product of collective actions was an important enabler of these innovations, as well as the innovator’s proactive attitude toward continuous improvement. Public values and supporting ecosystem services were emphasized from the early stages of collective actions, to realize synergies toward integrated natural resource management. It is also important to achieve conditions in which collective actions could be practiced autonomously and adaptively. These results revealed the great potential of autonomous innovations emerging among socially vulnerable groups and the important mechanisms for promoting autonomous innovations for the transformation of social-ecological systems toward sustainable futures.

Solving complex system challenges such as natural resource management in social-ecological systems (SESs) is fraught with great uncertainty. To cope with these challenges, socially vulnerable people in developing countries have created various autonomous innovations. This study focuses on the concept of leverage point (LP) to understand the emergence of innovations and the transformation mechanism of SESs. An LP is a part of a complex system where a small change can cause transformations in the entire system and can be identified from causal networks in an SES. This study analyzed the emergence processes of autonomous innovations as causal networks through transdisciplinary collaboration with innovators in communities and succeeded in visualizing the initial conditions, outcomes, and challenges. We constructed a new definition of LPs based on graph theory and classified LPs into three types based on their characteristics. The network analysis of the causal networks of two innovations in developing countries revealed that the three types of LPs functioned synthetically in complex systems to promote transformation. Based on these results, we propose the potential ways of interventions for the transformation of complex system networks including plural LPs and discuss their effectiveness as boundary objects in transdisciplinary processes collaborating with diverse stakeholders. Further research is expected to accumulate knowledge for solving the various challenges faced by SESs.

To address the complex and difficult challenges that are occurring in complex social-ecological systems, a transformation toward sustainable futures is required. Understanding the characteristics and functions of leverage points (LPs), which bring about significant changes in complex systems, will greatly contribute to the various practices toward achieving sustainable futures. We conducted a detailed analysis of 15 cases of autonomous innovations emerging among vulnerable sectors in six countries to contribute to understanding the mechanisms of transformation of social-ecological systems by identifying the characteristics and functions of LPs. We found that three types of LPs with different characteristics play their roles in a multi-layered and interrelated manner in the emergence processes of autonomous innovations. These LPs contributed to the improvement of various aspects of well-being and facilitated the transformation of the social-ecological systems by enhancing the five previously proposed enabler categories. The multi-layered and interrelated functioning of LPs promotes the enhancement of various aspects of human well-being and strengthens the enabler categories. These were found to be important mechanisms for the transformation of social-ecological systems. Based on these results, we derive nine guiding principles for the conditions and mechanisms of transformation. These results indicate that a deeper study of autonomous innovation through an LP lens could make a significant contribution to solving or mitigating the wicked problems faced by humanity.

Transformation of social-ecological systems is required to overcome complex and difficult challenges and move forward toward sustainable futures for humanity and the environment. We have accumulated case examples of autonomous innovations emerging among community members in rural areas of developing countries through transdisciplinary dialogues with innovators. Collective actions among diverse actors in communities are mobilized in these autonomous innovations to promote transformations by creating synergies among resource management practices. Synergy creation has a greater impact on transformations of social-ecological systems because broader people are involved in the network, the range of covered resources and ecosystems is wider, and diverse beneficiaries are involved. We applied a novel approach to visualize leverage points in the emergence processes of synergies in autonomous innovations to understand the pathways and mechanisms of social-ecological transformation driven by these innovations. We made comparisons of 17 cases of autonomous innovations with and without synergies to clarify the mechanisms of social-ecological transformations through synergies. The process of synergy creation was complicated and several factors in the initial phases of autonomous innovations interact with each other to generate synergies. These factors included perception changes of people and innovators and visualization of new challenges. We also found that diverse functions of leverage points appearing at the initial phases played critical roles in synergy creation. Functions related to synergy creation such as the visualization of challenges, creation of values, and promoting changes of perceptions were important. Based on these analyses, we propose six guiding principles for local practitioners, community-based innovators, and transdisciplinary scientists collaborating with these actors to promote the transformation of social-ecological systems through the creation of synergies in autonomous innovations.