From Fragmentation to Framework

How IMAGINE Is Helping a Field Find Itself

There is a particular kind of problem that emerges when a good idea spreads faster than the thinking around it can mature. Inner transformation for sustainability has, over the past decade, moved from the margins of academic discourse to something approaching a mainstream concern. The IPCC now acknowledges it. Major policy institutions reference it. Organisations around the world are adopting frameworks like the Inner Development Goals. Conferences, programmes, and communities of practice have multiplied.

And yet, precisely because the field has grown so fast, it has also grown unevenly. Researchers in different disciplines use different terminology for the same phenomena. Practitioners adopt methods without a shared understanding of the theory behind them. Critics — some in good faith, some not — find it easy to dismiss the territory as soft, individualistic, or politically naive. A field that cannot clearly articulate what it is, what it claims, and on what grounds, is vulnerable to all three charges simultaneously.

This is the problem that Ives, Schäpke, Woiwode and Wamsler set out to address in their 2023 paper “IMAGINE Sustainability: Integrated Inner-Outer Transformation in Research, Education and Practice.” It is not a study generating new empirical findings. It is something arguably more necessary at this stage of the field’s development: a systematising framework that gives shared orientation to researchers, educators, and practitioners working across disciplines, languages, and contexts. In doing so, it also provides the IDG initiative with something it has been implicitly working toward — a coherent scientific home.

The authors Christopher D. Ives, Niko Schäpke, Christoph Woiwode and Christine Wamsler

Why Systematisation Matters

It is worth pausing on what a framework of this kind actually does. Individual studies advance knowledge in specific directions. Systematic reviews, like Wamsler’s 2021 paper, map what is already known. But frameworks do something different: they provide shared vocabulary, organise relationships between concepts, and help a community of practice recognise itself as such.

Without this kind of orientation, a fast-growing field faces several characteristic dangers. It becomes easy to dismiss because no two practitioners seem to be saying quite the same thing. It becomes easy to co-opt because the absence of conceptual rigour means almost anything can be labelled inner transformation. And it becomes difficult to scale because each institution, programme, or initiative has to reinvent its conceptual foundations from scratch rather than building on shared ground.

The IMAGINE framework — six characteristics organised across the dimensions of ontology, praxis, and epistemology — directly addresses all three risks. By making explicit what inner transformation claims about the nature of reality, what it implies for practice, and what it requires from knowledge systems, the framework gives the field the kind of self-knowledge it needs to develop with both ambition and integrity.

IMAGINE: systematisation of the six core characteristics of inner transformation and inner–outer change processes, organised under the dimensions of ontology, praxis and epistemology. All six characteristics are entangled, intertwined and interdependent

The Framework: A Guided Tour

The IMAGINE acronym maps onto six characteristics, but what makes the framework intellectually serious is not the acronym itself but the three-dimensional structure beneath it. The authors organise the six characteristics into ontology, praxis, and epistemology — and this organisation is not arbitrary. It reflects a genuinely coherent argument: that inner transformation requires, first, a different understanding of what reality is; second, a different approach to action; and third, a different approach to knowledge. Each dimension builds on the one before.

Ontologically, the framework identifies two foundational claims. The first is Interdependence: inner and outer, individual and collective, human and ecological phenomena are not separate domains but mutually constituted processes. The second is Multiple latent potential: each human being possesses innate capacities for care, connection, and transformation that can be cultivated but not installed from outside.

In terms of praxis, the framework distinguishes between Activation — the work of engaging inner dimensions across individual, collective, and institutional levels simultaneously — and Generation — the deliberate cultivation of specific transformative capacities through intentional practices, from contemplative and psychological methods to transformative education and leadership approaches.

Epistemologically, the framework insists on INclusion of diverse forms of knowledge — including experiential, indigenous, and wisdom-based knowing — and on Expansion of the systems through which knowledge is produced, validated, and transmitted. Together these six characteristics are presented not as a checklist but as an ecology: entangled, mutually reinforcing, and collectively constituting what it means to take inner transformation seriously.

The Relational Turn: The Philosophical Heart

Of the framework’s contributions, the most philosophically significant and practically consequential is its grounding in a relational ontology. This deserves careful attention because it is easy to misread and easy to underestimate.

A relational ontology does not simply mean that relationships are important. It means that relationships are ontologically primary — that what things are is constituted by their relationships rather than the other way round. Applied to sustainability, this means that the crisis we face is not primarily a resource allocation problem or a governance failure or even a values deficit. It is a relational crisis: a profound disconnection between humans and themselves, between humans and one another, and between humanity and the broader community of life.

This reframing has immediate practical implications. If the crisis is relational, then solutions that address only external variables — energy systems, policy incentives, governance structures — are working at the wrong level, or at best at an insufficient one. And interventions at the individual level that treat people as isolated units to be improved, rather than as nodes in a web of relationships to be transformed, miss the point equally. What is required are approaches that work simultaneously on the quality of relationships across all scales: within the self, between people, within institutions, and between humanity and the living world.

This is why the framework insists that activation must happen across individual, collective, and institutional levels simultaneously. Not because scale is important in some general sense, but because the relational nature of the crisis means that individual transformation that does not feed into collective and systemic change remains incomplete, and institutional change that does not engage the inner lives of the people operating within institutions remains superficial.

Multiple Latent Potential: An Anti-Engineering Ethics

The framework’s second ontological claim — that each person possesses multiple latent capacities for connection and change — may seem less philosophically ambitious than the relational ontology, but its ethical implications are equally significant.

Most approaches to behaviour change, however well-intentioned, implicitly treat the people they target as objects to be modified. The nudge is the paradigmatic example: an environmental intervention designed to bypass conscious deliberation and redirect behaviour through carefully engineered choice architectures. Even more participatory approaches can carry a paternalistic assumption that practitioners know what transformed people should look like and their job is to produce them.

Inner transformation, as the IMAGINE framework conceives it, explicitly rejects this logic. Beginning from an ontology of latent potential — the view that the capacities needed for sustainability are already present in human beings, waiting to be recognised and cultivated rather than installed — the framework insists that inner transformation work is about creating conditions for emergence rather than engineering predetermined outcomes. This is not merely a philosophical nicety. It is a direct response to the instrumentalisation risk that the Wamsler 2021 review had already flagged: the danger that contemplative and developmental practices get co-opted by the growth paradigm as tools for producing more effective, more resilient, more productive individuals rather than more genuinely transformed ones.

The distinction matters for the IDG initiative specifically. Competency frameworks can easily slide toward a logic of acquisition — the idea that inner development is a process of accumulating capacities that can be assessed, certified, and compared. The IMAGINE framework’s insistence on latent potential and relational ontology provides a corrective: the IDGs are not a curriculum for installing new software into human beings, but a map of the territory that opens when people begin to inhabit their own depth more fully.

IMAGINE and the IDGs: A Scientific Home

The paper explicitly references the Inner Development Goals as one of the most significant practical expressions of the inner transformation agenda. The five clusters of transformative capacities identified in the Wamsler 2021 review — awareness, connection, insight, purpose, and agency — are described as directly reflected in the IDG framework’s five dimensions of Being, Thinking, Relating, Collaborating, and Acting.

The Inner Development Goals Framework

What the IMAGINE framework now provides is the conceptual architecture that the IDG initiative has been operating within intuitively but without always being able to articulate explicitly. It gives the IDGs a philosophical foundation — relational ontology, multiple latent potential — that explains not just what the five dimensions are but why they are relevant, and what theory of human development and social change they rest on. It provides an epistemological grounding that helps the IDGs resist the drift toward positivism and measurement that institutional adoption tends to produce. And it provides an ethical framework that keeps the initiative oriented toward genuine transformation rather than the production of more capable sustainability professionals.

For those working to advance the IDGs in policy, organisational, and educational contexts, IMAGINE is therefore not background reading but essential orientation. It answers the questions that sceptics ask — what is the theory of change here, what are the ontological assumptions, why these capacities and not others — and it answers them rigorously, in the language of sustainability science, with explicit reference to the empirical literature.

The Hardest Part: Epistemological Honesty

The IMAGINE framework’s epistemological dimension — INclusion and Expansion — is its most demanding and, in many ways, its most important. It is also the dimension that institutions most reliably find ways to avoid.

To include diverse forms of knowledge in sustainability work means genuinely engaging with experiential, contemplative, indigenous and participatory ways of knowing — not as exotic additions to the margins of a fundamentally positivist research programme, but as epistemologically equal partners in the production of knowledge about what is real and what matters. It means acknowledging, as the paper explicitly states, that the Enlightenment assumptions underpinning modern science are themselves culturally conditioned worldviews, not neutral access points to objective reality. And it means confronting the entanglement of post-Enlightenment science with colonial power dynamics that have systematically excluded Global South perspectives from sustainability decision-making.

This is not comfortable territory for most academic institutions, policy frameworks, or corporate sustainability programmes. The temptation is to adopt the language of inner transformation while leaving the epistemological foundations unchanged — to add mindfulness to an MBA programme without questioning what an MBA is for, or to incorporate the IDGs into a leadership development curriculum without asking whose model of leadership is being developed.

The IMAGINE framework will not allow this evasion without cost. Its epistemological dimension is not an optional extension of the framework but one of its six constitutive characteristics. A version of inner transformation that claims the framework’s authority while declining its epistemological implications is not applying IMAGINE — it is using the framework’s legitimacy to protect itself from the framework’s demands.

A Compass, Not a Map

A framework is not a destination. IMAGINE does not tell us what inner transformation will look like in any particular context, how long it takes, what it costs, or how to measure whether it has happened. What it offers instead is orientation — a way of knowing where you are in a complex and still-emerging territory, and a way of recognising when you have wandered from it.

For the IDG initiative and the broader field of inner development for sustainability, the questions that now need answering are not foundational but directional. The case that inner worlds matter for outer change has been made, systematised, and placed on a credible scientific foundation. The work ahead is to follow the implications of that foundation honestly — including the uncomfortable ones about epistemology, about institutional power, about the difference between cultivating human potential and managing human behaviour.

IMAGINE gives the field a compass. Whether we are willing to follow where it points is, appropriately enough, itself a question of inner development.

Parts of this essay were developed in dialogue with AI language models, which were used to support idea exploration, phrasing, and language refinement. All AI-generated content was reviewed, edited, and integrated by the author to ensure accuracy, coherence, and alignment with the intended meaning. The conceptual framing, structure, arguments, and all final editorial decisions are entirely the work of the author, with AI serving as a creative and analytical tool — much like a research assistant or editorial partner. Full responsibility for the content rests with the author.

This essay is licensed under CC-BY 4.0 and may be shared, adapted, and used freely (including for AI training) with attribution to Tomas Björkman. https://orcid.org/0009-0004-3628-7223

Archived version (DOI): https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19650256