The Essence of Inner Transformation for Sustainability and the Inner Development Goals: A Conversation Between Prof. Christine Wamsler and Tomas Björkman
Over the past decade, the field of Inner Transformation for Sustainability has grown into a substantial and influential body of knowledge, providing much of the scientific foundation for the Inner Development Goals (IDGs). In this conversation, Professor Christine Wamsler and Tomas Björkman reflect on the current state of the field. They emphasize that any meaningful application of the IDG Guide requires a deeper grounding in the underlying science and practice of inner transformation to effectively challenge unsustainable power structures, social norms, and dominant paradigms.
Tomas: Christine, you recently published a thought-provoking article in which you argue that modern societies are increasingly caught in a vicious cycle that undermines individual, collective, and planetary wellbeing. In the article, you also provide a comprehensive account of what might be considered the essence of the field of inner transformation for sustainability and, by extension, the deeper foundations of the IDGs. Could you briefly provide some background and summarize this essence, highlighting its relevance for those working at the interface of inner development and systems transformation?
Christine: Of course. The emerging scientific field of Inner Transformation for Sustainability looks at how inner development, behavior, culture, and systems interact to help us better address today’s polycrisis — the growing set of interconnected existential threats that reinforce and amplify one another. Current policy approaches for addressing this polycrisis are simply insufficient. A central reason is that we often understand threats — like climate change — as external crises. And because the way we define problems shapes how we respond, we tend to rely primarily on external, technical solutions. To make matters worse, current policy approaches are based on the knowledge-deficit model — the idea that simply giving everyone more information will solve our problems. But research has shown that this isn’t true. Finally, there is a gap between the work of professionals who focus on sustainability and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), on the one hand, and those who focus on inner, personal development and wellbeing, on the other. As a result, our professional and technical skills to address today’s polycrisis have grown exponentially, but our capacity to use them wisely has not.
To address these gaps, the rapidly growing field of Inner Transformation for Sustainability has emerged. It has generated new knowledge and evidence that is increasingly informing key societal actors, governmental organizations, policy institutions, and UN global assessment reports, which now explicitly emphasize inner transformation as essential for lasting change. This is a groundbreaking development.
Tomas: What is the core of this new knowledge and evidence?
Christine: Work in this field has shown that today’s polycrisis is a reflection of an inner, human crisis, rooted in a profound separation — or alienation — from ourselves, from each other, and from nature. This alienation is rooted in the dominant paradigm in Western and modern societies, which assumes that our mind is separate from our emotions and body, that we are independent from one another, that some people are superior to others, and that humans are separate from, and superior to, nature. These assumptions persist despite robust scientific evidence, across fields such as ecology, neuroscience, psychology, anthropology, and systems science, all of which demonstrate the deep interconnectedness of all that exists.
Tomas: May I briefly interrupt you so you can clarify two things you just mentioned?
Christine: Of course, go ahead.
Tomas: If separation is indeed a root cause, should we not prefer the term meta-crisis over poly-crisis? Not pedantry, but because your own diagnosis warrants it. Poly- counts the crises; meta- points beneath them, to the single condition of separation from which they severally arise. The standard term keeps us enumerating symptoms; yours is really a claim about a root, and the name should carry that.
Christine: Indeed. I use the term polycrisis to describe the crises we are seeing today, including ecological collapse, a global mental health crisis, polarization, inequality, and political turmoil — threats that reinforce and amplify one another. It is somewhat paradoxical: many of us are likely living in the utopia our grandparents dreamed of — benefiting from reduced child mortality, increased life expectancy, modern healthcare, access to education, etcetera. Yet this progress has also brought serious unintended consequences. I refer to these combined crises as the polycrisis. Underlying this, there is a deeper inner human crisis of separation, which I refer to as the metacrisis. I hope that clarifies it. What was your other question?
Tomas: Thank you. You mentioned that the paradigm of separation persists despite robust scientific evidence. I think this connects back to the knowledge-deficit model you mentioned earlier, doesn’t it?
Christine: Absolutely. It’s therefore not surprising that we haven’t acted yet on this knowledge. We need transformative education and approaches that engage cognitive, emotional, relational, ethical, and social facets — or, more simply, the head, the heart, the body, and the hands.
Tomas: Yes, if the trouble were really evidential, more science would dissolve it, and it doesn’t; the deficit model has been failing in climate communication for decades for exactly this reason. It means that the paradigm persists not because people are uninformed but because it does real meaning-work. We can see it as a Market-paradigm that functions as a kind of sacred canopy — a cultural structure that organizes significance and identity — rather than a cognitive mistake awaiting correction. People are subject to it rather than holding it as object, and it supplies the very canopy of significance whose erosion produces the “illusion of insignificance” you name so well at the outset of your article. As you highlight, separation and insignificance are not two findings but one. That is also why contemplative or developmental approaches are so urgently needed, not because participants learn new facts about interconnection, but because the work loosens the grip the paradigm holds on them.
Christine: I couldn’t agree more. What I call in the article the Western economic mindset and paradigm is performative in that it shapes who we become. It defines the rules of the game we live by, trapping us in patterns of optimizing for self-interest and short-term gains. As a result, we find ourselves relentlessly exploiting and exhausting ourselves, others, and the planet. This also means that individual heroes won’t get us out of this. What we need instead is a deeper transformation that addresses the inner root causes of today’s polycrisis. Achieving this requires integrative approaches that nurture forms of embodied knowing that go beyond purely cognitive understanding.
Although increasing knowledge is not sufficient in itself, it is important to highlight and communicate to policymakers and the public that the underlying abstraction of the Western economic mindset and paradigm are increasingly misaligned with contemporary insights across the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities. Too often, interconnectedness gets dismissed as something merely spiritual, but in fact it’s a scientifically grounded reality.
Another crucial aspect to understand is that the paradigm of separation shapes not only our mindsets. It shapes our individual mindsets, behaviors, culture, and institutions. In everyday life, it manifests in what I call a series of -isms, such as individualism, materialism, consumerism, racism, elitism, and extractivism — all conditions that systematically undermine wellbeing and contribute to the deterioration of mental, physical, collective, and planetary health. Consequently, our mental health and the health of our planet are deeply entangled. Human wellbeing depends on the quality of our relationships, and the same is true for the wellbeing of our planet. To make matters worse, our mindset functions simultaneously as a root cause of the climate crisis, a victim of escalating climate impacts, and a barrier to adequate climate action. In other words, as much as our minds are driving climate change, climate change is driving negative mental health, anxiety, and denial, which in turn worsen our responses at the individual, collective, and system levels, reinforcing existing paradigms and feelings of separation.
Transformative change thus requires addressing the root causes of today’s polycrisis and engaging with the inner dimensions underlying increasing alienation from self, others, and nature, which are deeply embedded in individual mindsets, behaviors, cultures, and structures. These inner dimensions are considered deep leverage points for change. They refer to human awareness, including individual and collective beliefs, values, worldviews, and the inner capacities that shape them. This definition is crucial for everyone working at the interface of inner development and sustainability.
Based on this, certain inner capacities can be identified as transformative, as they have the potential to nurture reconnection through the development of more relational beliefs, values, and worldviews. Another term for these transformative capacities [1] is the IDGs, summarized in the so-called IDG Guide. This guide is not a scientific framework, but — like the SDGs — a communication tool that is scientifically informed by the emerging scientific field of Inner Transformation for Sustainability.
Tomas: Do I understand you correctly that you see separation as something to be corrected and reconnection as the cure?
Christine: Sorry if my reflections gave that impression; it is not really about correcting or curing something. Your question is crucial, because it allows me to highlight an important ethical aspect. The field of Inner Transformation for Sustainability is not about saying we need to fix or change other people’s beliefs, values, and worldviews. It is not about convincing people or changing their views toward a defined aim or cure. This would turn people into objects to be changed, rather than seeing them as change-makers or agents of change. It would preserve business-as-usual through a dualistic, blaming, fix-it and fix-others mentality that reinforces current unsustainable paradigms.
Instead, from a sustainability perspective, we need to create spaces, and conditions that can nurture a culture of inner development, mutual support, and engagement from a place of shared, universal values and interconnection. This will ultimately rattle unsustainable norms, cultures, and power structures through a developmental process. In this context, the field also explicitly highlights the need to integrate different knowledge systems, including local knowledge and wisdom traditions. This is one of the key elements and contributions of the field, which we have summarized in the IMAGINE framework.
Tomas: Thank you for your clarifications. This is indeed crucial. I agree with the developmental and evolutionary register: Modernity’s individuation was not a mistake but a stage — the differentiation of self from cosmos, of the human from nature, of political economy from moral philosophy. Your own historical sketch of the economic mindset in your article, via Mill and Schumpeter, traces precisely this differentiation — and it sits more comfortably with a developmental reading than with a corrective one. A corrective framing would also allege circularity: Separation is the root cause, the -isms its manifestations, reconnection the remedy, reduced anxiety the confirmation — a loop that risks being unfalsifiable. An evolutionary-emergent account breaks the loop, because it gives an independent reason why the paradigm arose and persisted, it was functional, not merely erroneous, so its dissolution becomes a developmental achievement rather than a tautological inevitability.
Christine: Yes. This understanding is also vital for thinking about how we can all contribute to a more sustainable and caring society, and the regeneration of human and planetary wellbeing. Practices for inner transformation are not a panacea. But research suggests that integrative approaches can help in important ways: They can increase resilience by helping us respond more effectively to challenging experiences, thoughts, and emotions. They can support more sustainable behavior and decision-making by helping us overcome the mental habits and biases that drive short-term and polarized thinking. They can nurture more sustainable cultures and paradigms by fostering awareness of our shared humanity and interconnectedness. And they can strengthen engagement and the integration of sustainability across policies and institutions by deepening our understanding of our role within broader social and ecological systems.
At the same time, the field of Inner Transformation for Sustainability emphasizes that developing inner, transformative capacity and vertical growth is crucial, but insufficient on its own. Transformative change requires us to address the inner human crisis — by challenging the paradigm of separation across sectors and levels. This involves how organizations, systems, and frameworks are designed, and how more caring, relational capacities, values, beliefs, and worldviews can be institutionally embedded and operationalized to move toward a society of care and regeneration.
Tomas: I want to underline that “insufficient on its own” is doing more work than it first appears. It is tempting to read it as a caveat — inner work plus a bit of institutional follow-through — but I think it is structural. A genuinely relational ontology cannot treat collective transformation as the sum of individual transformations. If enough individuals shift, the reasoning goes, the system shifts; yet that is itself the individualist social ontology the field sets out to dissolve. Minds or mindsets are already culturally and structurally constituted: our beliefs and values are held as much by institutions and cultures as by the persons who inhabit them. So locating the root cause in our minds risks quietly reinstating the very separation we are trying to overcome. Culture and structure are not downstream targets of changed minds; they are co-constitutive of mind in the first place.
Christine: Exactly. That is also why I previously highlighted that the paradigm of separation is not just ingrained in our mindsets, but embedded across mindsets, behaviors, culture, and institutions. The field of Inner Transformation for Sustainability brings together the relational and the systemic; it is about individual change. Yet people often understand “individual” when they hear “inner” — but that is not what the field is about. The conditions, cultures, and structures we live within shape our inner lives, just as our inner lives shape them. This is precisely why creating spaces and conditions matters so much: transformation is not about placing responsibility on the individual; it should not be an individual effort, again something added to our never-ending to-do lists. Rather, it is about nurturing the relational social and institutional contexts in which more caring ways of being can take root and be sustained.
Tomas: Could you give some concrete examples of how this could look like in practice?
Christine: It means for instance actively reshaping organizational cultures and work structures so that wellbeing and sustainability are not siloed; adapting rules and policies to nurture care and connection; realigning operational and funding mechanisms to support integrative approaches; introducing new forms of collaboration and communication to foster compassion, agency, hope, and meaning; and creating dedicated physical and temporal spaces that enable conditions for inner development, reflection, silence, and regeneration. In this way, (re)connectedness can become practically experienced, and wellbeing and sustainable behavior is systematically supported.
Tomas: Thank you. Linking back to the starting point of our conversation, I am wondering what this mean for applying the IDG Guide or other approaches in a way that aligns with its underlying scientific grounding and essence?
Christine: It means that nurturing transformative capacities is crucial, but not enough on its own. Simply developing related education and leadership training is not sufficient. IDG-related work needs to be embedded within broader societal, institutional, and systemic processes of change that I described. It requires a deeper understanding of the “how” of transformation — how change can be supported. This involves addressing alienation from self, others, and nature, and nurturing conditions for (re)connection across multiple levels, including individual mindsets, behaviors, cultures, and systems — thereby engaging deep leverage points. It is about creating spaces and conditions for emergence and engagement from a place of shared, universal values and interconnection.
In this sense, inner transformation can be understood as a fractal process: patterns of reconnection repeat across scales, with change at one level both reflecting and influencing change at others. At the same time, transformation also requires attending to more shallow but still crucial levers that can address proximate causes, as well as immediate impacts and needs, such as biophysical drivers, loss and damage, and mental health.
I have seen many professionals struggle to apply the IDGs and related approaches when they are not grounded in this broader context. Nobody needs to change profession, field, or become a trainer or facilitator to contribute to this work. Everyone can examine how their work — including its tools, practices, structures, incentives, and policies — may unintentionally reinforce alienation, and explore ways to reduce this and foster greater connection and care. How this is framed and put into practice will naturally differ across sectors, professions, and target groups.
Tomas: Thank you. In your recent article you do not only mention interconnection or interconnectedness, you also engage with the corresponding spiritual concept of interbeing. I think it is worthwhile to explore these concepts a bit further regarding what it means for transformation. Interbeing, as presented, seems to be mainly a horizontal claim: reality is a web, separation is the illusion, the nodes inter-are. It is strongest on process, interdependence, and generativity, and it seems to be comparatively quiet on the vertical register — the unconditioned ground that is prior to the distinction between relata and relations.
What makes this more than terminology is that the participants in your study seem to reach past the horizontal reading. Participants’ understanding of the Ultimate Dimension as “opening a spaciousness inside” is not really an expression of interconnection; it is closer to a non-dual depth-report — contact with ground rather than with web. As you write, processes of inner–outer transformation also involve the Historical and Ultimate Dimensions that go beyond simply “everything is connected.”
Christine: I agree. Another, complementary perspective is that these aspects are part of the paradigm of separation — from self, others, nature, and the sacred — which also involves our understanding of time. The Ultimate Dimension is where the interbeing and timeless nature of all phenomena can be perceived in a non-dual way. The concept of interbeing offered participants in our study a narrative through which to understand their lives and their relationship to broader societal and systemic processes. Since we have systematically stripped away the consideration of the inner in current society, we lack language to engage in ways of living that are more wholesome. I therefore also highlight in the article that the importance of the concept of interbeing may lie less in the specifically spiritual grounding and more in its universal character and psychological and relational resonance.
Alienation is not abstract. It is present in everyday life, where we are relentlessly and increasingly exhausting and exploiting ourselves, others, and the planet. The paradox of modern life is that while we are more connected technologically than ever before, many of us experience growing disconnection, accompanied by an associated loss of meaning. Science confirms this through, for instance, measurable increases in loneliness, stress, attentional fragmentation, reduced well-being, and weaker community ties — alongside ecological and experiential “distance” from nature. Personal and intergenerational trauma can reinforce these patterns.
Tomas: Thank you for these clarifications. I think the addition you just made — separation from the sacred — is precisely what lets the thread close. It names the vertical register I was referring to. Read only horizontally, interbeing says the nodes inter-are; read vertically, it points to a ground that is prior to the very distinction between node and web — not one more connection among things, but the depth in which things arise at all.
Christine: I agree. It might sound abstract or philosophical, but in simple terms, the field of Inner Transformation and the IDGs ask a very practical question: How can we move from a situation in which we are increasingly exhausting and exploiting ourselves, others, and the planet towards a society that is more caring, just, and sustainable? Addressing this question requires us to engage with existential questions — questions about who we are, what we value, and how we relate to ourselves, to one another, and to the more-than-human world around us.
Tomas: Thank you. Before we finish, is there anything you’d like to add or reflect on?
Christine: Thank you. I would like to end on a positive note by highlighting that the field of Inner Transformation helps shifting us from denial and anxiety toward hope, agency, and “triple wellbeing” — individual, collective, and planetary. We cannot change planetary boundaries, but we can change culture. Think back to how much the current culture differs from that of our grandparents and even our parents. If we imagine that the culture of our children and grandchildren will be equally different, isn’t it tremendously encouraging to invest our time and energy in creating a new story — a new narrative to live by?
Importantly, inner transformative capacities are not only urgently required to address today’s polycrisis, they are also innate. This means that sustainability and well-being, and ultimately flourishing, can be nurtured and developed across individual, collective, and planetary levels. However, cultivating them is not simply a matter of individual responsibility. It requires collective, political, and systemic efforts to create the spaces, relationships, and conditions in which these capacities can emerge and thrive.
Tomas: Thank you for this inspiring conversation, and for clarifying the essence of Inner Transformation for sustainability and the IDGs.
Christine: Likewise — the pleasure was mine. Thank you.
The research underpinning this talk is available here. This article is also published on Tomas Björkman’s Medium page
Endnote: [1] The five clusters of transformative capacities — awareness, connection, insight, purpose, and agency — can be seen as a scientific counterpart to the five clusters of the IDG Guide. They extend the four pillars of wellbeing by integrating individual, collective, and planetary flourishing.
Citation: Wamsler, C., Björkman, T. (2026). The essence of inner transformation for sustainability and the Inner Development Goals. Medium. https://christine-wamsler.medium.com/the-essence-of-inner-transformation-for-sustainability-and-the-inner-development-goals-a-f55b20bc8ee8
