Beyond your Bubble: Understanding Stakeholder Perspectives in Transitions

AIM OF SESSION 

The aim of this session is to support participants in looking at positionality as a core element of sustainability transitions: considering the wider ecosystem, understand the various perspectives of the various stakeholders involved, and their relationships, values, and motivations that shape decision-making. 

For that, it is fundamental to understand that we all operate within particular “bubbles”: social, cultural, professional, and/or personal environments that influence how we understand issues, formulate our viewpoints and preferences, and how we make decisions. By becoming aware of their own bubble(s), and by acknowledging and appreciating the bubbles of diverse stakeholders, participants begin to see why different groups have certain beliefs and make certain choices, and why sustainability transitions sometimes get “stuck” or suffer from so-called lock-ins. 

The session emphasizes the importance of positionality in sustainability transitions: recognizing where we stand, how our backgrounds shape our interpretations, and why I is sometimes difficult to reconcile multiple viewpoints in addressing systemic challenges. 

This session also highlights that many crises, whether environmental, social, or economic, share similar underlying patterns, and that resolving them depends at least as much on human behaviour, values, and relationships as on the feasibility of technologies. 

Ultimately, the session assists participants to acknowledge and appreciate that while (ideas for) solutions may already exist within sustainability and climate debates, meaningful sustainability transitions require connection: connecting people to each other’s perspectives, connecting actions to values, and connecting knowledge to a shared sense of purpose. These connections create the conditions for collective mind shifts and transformative change. 

BACKGROUND 

This educational material activity was facilitated with second-year students from the Energy Transitions course within the Academy for Built Environment & Logistics (ABEL) at Breda University of Applied Sciences (BUas). However, the topic at hand in this learning activity is not necessarily directly linked to the specific contents of their programme/course, and, thus, this particular workshop can be used in almost all courses and programmes. In fact, the topic was purposely chosen and presented as an example of an underlying problem that represents a key aspect to consider in sustainability transitions in various sectors across our socio-economic system. The learning activity focus on the topic of the nitrogen crisis – an urgent and much-debated crisis in the Netherlands, which serves as a typical example of a sustainability problem that is not necessarily difficult to “solve” from a science or technological perspective, but proving to be extremely difficult to resolve in practice. It is a typical holistic and systemic challenge, involving environmental, social, political, and economic dimensions. By approaching the issue systemically, students were invited to look beyond symptoms and consider the deeper structures, the social actors involved ,their  relationships, and the (behavioural) patterns that have shaped this crisis. 

The workshop also introduced the idea of designing with potential in mind, encouraging students to explore opportunities, possibilities, and leverage points for sustainability transitions rather than focusing only on restrictions or limitations. 

FACILITATION 

The facilitator’s role is not to provide answers, but to hold a safe, open, and creative environment where reflection, curiosity, and dialogue can flourish. The emphasis is on helping participants explore different perspectives of stakeholders within sustainability transitions, and the underlying reasons for these differences. 

A helpful way to begin is by sharing your own positionality as a facilitator. You can share one  “bubble” that you belong to – it can be a social, cultural, professional, or personal context you come from. Choose something light, fun, or unrelated to a complex or controversial sustainability issue. This way you set the stage for participation which helps create a relaxed atmosphere before moving into heavier content. 

Once the tone is set, your facilitation goes in three stages: 

1. Opening the space for perspectives 
   After sharing your bubble, invite participants to share their own bubbles and perspectives, highlighting from the start that diversity of viewpoints is central to understanding sustainability transitions. Participants can ask one another curious questions to foster an investigative yet light environment of each other’s stories.
2. Introducing a topic 
   After establishing a sense of openness, introduce the core topic of the workshop. Provide the key content, the challenge, and the range of stakeholder perspectives or controversies involved. You might consider to invite an expert on the topic to bring also facts and figures. Because participants have already surfaced their own positionalities and diverse perspectives, they will be more sensitive and receptive to the complexity of the issue and start looking beyond the facts and figures.
3. Collective meaning-making 
   Close with an invitation to a group dialogue: either plenary or in small groups. The aim is to reflect together on what was learned, what assumptions shifted, and how different bubbles influence the way we understand and act within sustainability transitions. As a facilitator show how different perspectives lead to different choices and how they all make sense for various stakeholders reasoning from  within their own bubble; invite personal sharing and ask for insights. 

The facilitator creates the sequence intentionally: establish openness first, then bring in the complexity of the topic, and finally hold space for collective sense-making.