Dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic: an opportunity to reflect on sustainability research

Despite the existence of pandemic plans in all EU member states and early Sars-COV‑2 warnings (ECDC 2007; Lopreite et al. 2021; Maxmen 2021), the COVID-19 pandemic has been perceived and interpreted by the broad public in Europe as a very disruptive incident. Consequences are affecting all fields of activity and are given high media visibility. They affect all social groups and sectors worldwide in a way never experienced in younger history by many, including (sustainability) scientists (e.g., Deutscher Ethikrat 2020). The pandemic and the measures that have been taken to respond to it have upset daily lives, exacerbated vulnerabilities, and greatly challenged what we had taken for granted individually and societally—at least temporarily. The pandemic is a complex and global problem that has repeatedly been requiring immediate solutions, although many unknowns and uncertainties about cause-and-effect relations make action often problematic. It has led to a major joint effort across disciplines, social groups, sectors, and nations, as well as to massive interventions that would have been unimaginable for many, especially in the Global North, just a few weeks before the onset of the crisis.

This has caught the attention of sustainability researchers who have been investigating levers for and barriers to systems change for several decades (e.g., Feola 2015; Grin et al. 2010; Westley et al. 2013). In a fast-forward mode, reactions to the pandemic display many characteristics that are similar to how problems in the context of sustainable development are dealt with. Why? Sustainability problems are also both local and global; they are complex, permeate all fields of society, and lead to trade-offs; and solving the problems calls for drastic and far-reaching changes. Accordingly, while sustainability researchers acknowledge the suffering that COVID-19 has caused and is still causing, they also see the pandemic and the responses to it as an opportunity to look at this “fast-forward” process with the aim of analysing a new constellation and its impact on societal transformations towards sustainability. At the same time, it has become clear that the measures taken to respond to the pandemic can have both a positive or negative impact on sustainability. On the one hand they have imposed changes to distinctly unsustainable patterns of behaviour and consumption (e.g., reduced mobility), on the other they have uncovered and challenged social dynamics and values (e.g., social inequalities and how they impact people’s exposure to risk, understandings of democracy, etc.). Two questions emerge from these observations regarding the relation between the COVID-19 pandemic and sustainability: First, what can we learn from the pandemic from the perspective of the societal transformation required by Agenda 2030 (UN 2015)? Second, how does the pandemic—and the measures taken to deal with it—impact sustainable development?

Such concerns have led sustainability researchers to the question whether the COVID-19 crisis might be a window of opportunity for fostering sustainability transformations (e.g., Schot 2020). Several contributions from (sustainability) research have already reported on first empirical knowledge, discussed how sustainability and the COVID-19 pandemic relate, and provided policy recommendations about how measures taken to deal with the current crisis should be designed in a way that supports sustainability transformations (e.g., Kleve et al. 2020; Vinke et al. 2020; https://​www.​wpn2030.​de/​corona-und-nachhaltigkeit, https://​www.​csc-blog.​org/​de, https://​www.​praefaktisch.​de/​covid-19/​). Research projects have spontaneously emerged, revealing sustainability scholars’ desire to further explore the different levels and domains where the COVID-19 pandemic relates to sustainability. These projects often adopt an interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary, and transformative perspective, with the aim of generating systems, target, and transformation knowledge for social-ecological change (ProClim/CASS 1997).

As of June 2020, a group of such sustainability researchers in the German-speaking part of Europe engaged in a spontaneous explorative exchange about whether the pandemic, the responses to the pandemic, and societal reactions to it also have an impact on sustainability research. They addressed such questions as: Does the pandemic uncover processes and dynamics that research should focus on? Does it challenge established methodological approaches? Does the pandemic reveal blind spots of sustainability research or point out phenomena or processes that until now had been underestimated? Does it question our assumptions about the role of science in societal transformation?

The present discussion paper offers the result of a structured exchange on ongoing sustainability research projects and in-depth and iterative reflection about lessons to be learned from research exploring sustainability impacts of the pandemic that took place from June 2020 to April 2021. The paper presents insights from this reflection process on sustainability research and the COVID-19 pandemic at two levels: At a first level, it offers insights from sustainability researchers (Sect. 2) working on projects investigating COVID-19 phenomena from a sustainability perspective. All the researchers who contributed to this section are aware that the pandemic is still evolving and that we are far from grasping what its effects will be in the long term. Nevertheless, the assumption of this paper is that analysing how the COVID-19 pandemic is being handled will provide impulses for improving governance and management of major social-ecological crises. Taking this into account the paper aims to explore areas of tension, to clarify what topics and questions related to the COVID-19 pandemic are of particular relevance to sustainability research, and to identify what may be learned from the pandemic for sustainability and for management of sustainability problems.

At the second level—drawing on the polyphony of statements made by the researchers who contributed their reflections, experiences, and assessments at the first level—the paper’s main author team reflects upon how the pandemic might inform sustainability research (Sect. 3). We are primarily interested in the question how sustainability research needs to be oriented and adjusted to new conditions, and how it can be further developed and adapted. Indeed, it would be inappropriate to offer a synthesis of the statements offered by the individual researchers in Sect. 2, since these statements are based on work in progress and reflect the multiplicity of foci, approaches, and positions that can be found in the community of sustainability researchers. Instead, what we provide is a meta-level reflection on the fitness for purpose of sustainability research in COVID-19 times and some open questions we believe need to be tackled by the sustainability science community. Importantly, in this discussion paper we limit our considerations to the social and scientific contexts of the Global North, especially of the German-speaking part of Europe.

The discussion paper emerged from three workshops (Table 1) carried out by a network of researchers who are committed to sustainability research and who work in Switzerland (CH), Germany (D), and Austria (A) (see Annex: Table 2). In the first workshop in October 2020, participants conducting research on the impacts of the COVID-19 crisis on sustainable development presented preliminary results (see Annex: Table 3). This generated a lively expert debate about both the suitability of research approaches to investigate the impacts of the pandemic and the validity of research results gained during the pandemic. For this reason, the main author team of the discussion paper organised a second workshop in December 2020 with the purpose of discussing such meta-level questions. Based on the minutes of the first workshop, the main author team identified key areas and questions to discuss further.

In the follow-up process to the second workshop, some of the participants formulated answers to the identified key questions and thus contributed to the present paper. Contributors were explicitly invited to provide insights, observations, and concerns, regardless of whether these were backed by systematic research. Their statements had to meet three criteria: (1) They should mirror the perspective of a scientist and not be a personal statement. (2) They should answer one of the following questions: “What does the Corona pandemic show that we did not see before?”, “What are topics/questions that we could not have investigated without the pandemic (not at all or not in the same way)?”, and “With regard to what questions of sustainability research can we gain insights from the pandemic and how it is dealt with?”. (3) They should not exceed 1000 characters.

The main author team discussed the statements and clustered them. If one of the statements did not meet the criteria, the team reached out to the author(s) and asked for a revision. Beyond this, the main author team did not influence the content of the statements. Thus, the paper also includes statements with which the main author team might not agree. The statements reflect the perspective and thinking of the authors who provided them; clustering of the statements did thus not occur with the aim of integrating them in a synthesis.

After having clustered the statements, the main author team treated these statements as qualitative data and discussed commonalities, differences, and fields of tension. This discussion was informed by the following question: What are the implications of the Corona pandemic and the lessons learned from the Corona pandemic for sustainability research? In a third workshop in April 2021, the meta-level reflections and questions of the main author team were discussed with the authors of the statements and subsequently developed further.

The procedure adopted by the main author team in developing this discussion paper is thus informed by the strategy of triangulation and of discursive validation: The statements provided by the sustainability researchers and the conclusions drawn from comparing them were discussed among the main author team until agreement was reached. The contributing researchers were provided with, and had the possibility of reacting to, both the conclusions of and the text introducing each cluster of statements. The following clusters emerged from the first workshop and were discussed in the second workshop: 1) impacts of the COVID-19 crisis on sustainability transformations, 2) learning for sustainability transformations, 3) the role of solidarity, 4) governance and political steering, and 5) the role of science in society. Each of these five topics is presented in the following sections with a) a brief substantiation of its relevance, b) key questions, c) the statements formulated by the workshop participants, and d) a short interim résumé.

We used critical debate, confronted diverse research perspectives and concerns triggered by COVID-19, and reflected on our short- and long-term experiences, examining sustainability research (projects) from different individual positions and perspectives as presented in Sect. 2. The aim of the multidisciplinary exchange among the German-speaking sustainability researchers involved in this paper was to gain orientation in a new societal dynamic that challenges sustainability—and sustainability research.

Based on our expertise on the complexities involved in human-environment interactions, we assume that the COVID19 pandemic has made certain aspects more visible, but it may also have (indirectly) triggered impacts that will only emerge and manifest themselves in the following endemic period. A synthesis aiming to offer new research avenues would not be appropriate in the midst of the prolonged crisis and its anticipated endemic phase, and across such a broad, disparate, and very incomplete spectrum of topics (see Annex: Table 3). For this reason, we do not want to jump to premature conclusions based on these insights, nor postulate a research program for sustainability scholars on COVID-19.

Nevertheless, the discussions reported above showed that the pandemic has challenged our scientific habits and questioned implicit assumptions we had about sustainability research. Based on concrete research experiences, the polyphonic reactions and thoughts (Annex: Table 2) led to a shared reflection on the meta-level about the nature and role of sustainability research, not only during but also, presumably, after the pandemic. The main author team’s first overarching ideas were therefore discussed with contributors at the third workshop (see Table 1). Here, we organise this reflection around three generic issues under which the discussion threads can be subsumed: a) the thematic and disciplinary focus of sustainability research, b) its time dimension, and c) the personal involvement of sustainability researchers. Each issue ends with questions that might be helpful for contextualising, (re-)orienting, and further developing the topics, methods, and value orientation of sustainability research in the longer term.

The statements in Sect. 2 show a need for sustainability research to deal with—or more systematically acknowledge—research topics that gained visibility during the pandemic. As a health (and not an environmental) crisis, the COVID-19 pandemic has shed light on the fact that global crises—and policies to deal with them—bear the danger of increasing social inequalities. We observed that the need to react very quickly led to risk prevention measures that did not adequately take into account impacts on the most vulnerable social groups. Besides well-known social inequalities (e.g. gender, differences in income and education), others, so far not as visible in the sustainability debate, emerged as requiring urgent attention to be able to cope with the crisis (e.g. quality of housing and the living environment, increased infection risk due to type of employment). The issue of increased social inequalities becomes even more striking when looking at the global situation. Apart from the well-known unequal-access-to-health-resources issue in the Global South, new concerns have emerged, e.g. reactions to the pandemic have destabilized informal economies that buffered rampant poverty, hunger, and other livelihood insecurities of the most vulnerable populations (Carmody et al. 2020; Kesar et al. 2021; Khambule 2020).

As the other side of this thematic coin, solidarity emerged as an important topic that can be dealt with on different levels by sustainability research. Reduction of individual freedom to protect the most vulnerable groups was widely accepted in the first wave of the pandemic as a form of institutional implementation of solidarity in Europe. Additionally, different individual and collective forms of solidarity arose spontaneously to support those societal groups that were most affected by the pandemic. They also emerged to alleviate social injustice or provide ad-hoc help. A systematic reflection on formal and informal institutionalizations of solidarity may deliver insights into new modes of governance, also in the context of sustainability science.

Altogether, the topics of social inequalities and solidarity show that there are no simple solutions to wicked problems, and sustainability research must be careful not to focus too early on specific issues: It must remain alert to side-effects and problem shifts. How can we make sure that we consider social issues when choosing a focus triggered by a health crisis? And are social aspects such as the accessibility and resilience of basic public services, as well as their inclusiveness and preventive character, appropriately considered? Moreover, these examples lead to the question whether sustainability research adequately reflects on how social science perspectives are related to other research perspectives, in particular in the natural sciences. Are they considered sufficiently in problem framing and analysis, as well as in the development of strategies and solutions to deal with these problems? Is the relationship between the different disciplines taken into account while working on interdisciplinary research questions?

Sustainability research aims to support transformation, which is radical and long-term in nature, rather than changes in the short-term that can be changed back again. The COVID-19 crisis has shown that acute crises call for feasible short-term solutions even if they generate trade-offs. Massive state intervention and redistribution of income and chances, among other measures, will set the course for the future. This experience reinforces the challenge for sustainability research of developing concepts that are effective in the short term but also viable in the long term, thus sticking to the basic direction of a long-term transformation perspective. In light of the COVID-19 pandemic, new questions arise for sustainability research with regard to state policy and the design of political processes under crisis conditions: Do we have time for participation, learning, solidarity, dealing with uncertainty, and (reflexive) science? How can crisis management be coherently linked with long-term sustainability goals?

Further, the statements in Sect. 2 illustrate sustainability researchers’ assumptions about changes due to the COVID-19 pandemic. It will be important to monitor very closely what changes are only temporary and which ones have a long-term and potentially definitive (transformative) character. Before generalizing, sustainability scientists must be careful not to overestimate the importance of certain phenomena that might be of a temporary nature or only valid for rather small parts of the population.

After all, the statements in Sect. 2 demonstrate the need for examining empirical evidence to understand how the overall societal constellation for sustainability transformations has changed. Contributions and discussions during the third workshop revealed a need for updated systems knowledge: Did the leverage points for sustainability transformations change due to COVID-19? Did the pandemic uncover hidden leverage points? Did it create new ones? Researchers must reflect on whether they are still focusing on the relevant short-term phenomena and are asking the right long-term questions to co-develop robust solutions for sustainability transformations. In particular, when drawing conclusions about their results, researchers need to be sensitive to the time horizon and to how short and long-term research perspectives relate to each other.

The question of (sustainability) scholars’ personal involvement in the phenomena they study, e.g. climate change, has long been the focus of debate (Gilford et al. 2019; Head and Harada 2017). Concerns have been raised that being personally affected leads to loss of critical distance for scientific analysis. Therefore, explaining one’s position regarding normative aspects and dealing consciously with emotions triggered by global threats are integral parts of sustainability research. When sustainability researchers rely on scientific methods to achieve analytic clarity of understanding, they ideally aim to make their position transparent and contextualise it (Schneider et al. 2019).

The fact that scholars are both affected by the pandemic and part of the ongoing changes that they are investigating can in fact be an opportunity for sustainability scholars to hone the skills needed for interdisciplinarity, in particular those skills leading to the epistemological awareness needed to conduct their work purposefully and with an open mind for other scientific perspectives. As underlined in the statements about learning processes in Sect. 2, the need to cope with changes in professional and private life causes emotions and may foster self-reflection. From the perspective of scientific practice, emotions and self-reflection may seem to interfere with “dispassionate” and “objective” analysis; but they can also be seen as part of the tacit knowledge through which we can connect with the value dimension of sustainability research and with the societal challenges of transformation. However, this requires clarifying what good scientific practise can acknowledge and making sense of emotional aspects that gain importance in times of crisis, e.g. influences from opinions, emotions, interests, power, and knowledge gaps.

Questions emerged from our multidisciplinary reflection on how to further develop our scholarly tacit knowledge out of the lived changes and challenges: Are we repeating the same things as before the COVID-19 crisis, although the preconditions have changed? Are we only able to see what we are trained to see? Science and society need critical, reflexive mechanisms for correcting perceptions and mindsets (Nölting and König 2019). Beyond the COVID-19 pandemic, times of crisis may lead sustainability scholars to (re-)focus their self-conception of engaged scholarship, thus benefitting from a more systematically reflected research dimension that could be called a “lived sense of knowing” based on wisdom. This might allow for another quality of field access and insights that may foster a (re-)balanced production and communication of “robust” knowledge and help to reveal wishful thinking and blind spots easily overlooked in sustainability research. But these ambitions also lead to the following questions: What structural conditions, personal capabilities, and mechanisms do we need to engage both in preventive and crisis coping research to achieve appropriate social interaction, individual, and societal learning? And what best supports knowledge generation, communication, and transfer in this complex endeavor? Exchange among researchers of the kind we presented here may be an appropriate way for critically reflecting on the effects of being affected while doing sustainability research.

To round off this discussion, let us come back to the starting question: What can sustainability research learn from the study of the COVID-19 pandemic? We began our multidisciplinary exchange after half a year of living with the pandemic and submitted our contribution for the first time after one year. Now, looking at the pandemic after over two years we share the impression that a deep and broad reflection on the many meanings and impacts of the pandemic for society, economy, and the environment is needed.

Empirical and other studies on the impacts of the pandemic have been published meanwhile (e.g. Echegaray et al. 2021; OECD 2020). Our own discussion with scholars and organisations from other scientific fields can be connected with finished, ongoing, or planned studies, e.g. in Germany (Deutscher Ethikrat 2022; Leopoldina 2020, 2021; Walz et al. 2022), in Switzerland (Rühli and Thier 2021; Beyeler et al. 2021; SNSF 2021), and in Austria (ÖAW 2020a, b), even if the main perspective of these studies is not sustainability science. Indeed, their publications reveal similar reflections and questions, e.g. what is needed for acute crisis management, and reference to the concepts of resilience, vulnerable groups, inequalities, and complex multiple crises. Sustainability science has focused on these topics for some time already and can contribute knowledge for preventing and handling future crisis in societies (Walz et al. 2022; wpn2030 2020). Vice versa, sustainability scientists can learn from pandemic-related debates in other domains about the role of science in society, science communication, research(ers) being affected (emotionally) by crisis, the limits of science, the role of and conditions for inter- and transdisciplinary research, etc. (Deutscher Ethikrat 2022; Leopoldina 2021). It remains to be seen what questions will be taken up from these studies; we hope that our multidisciplinary reflection can contribute to the overall debate on lessons to be learned from the pandemic.

A final word seems necessary in light of the current military crisis in Europe and its global impacts: our call for being better prepared for crises as sustainability researchers and our suggestions are more important than ever. This should include an awareness that lingering crises (e.g. poverty, climate change, loss of biodiversity) are also in need of an anticipatory and preventive attitude (wpn2030 2020). In times of acute crisis, inter- and transdisciplinary sustainability research is not a luxury and just one perspective among others; rather, it is a fundamental need that relies on critical and thorough reflection on short-term measures and developments with the lens of the needed long-term transformation.