Using the DRIFT X-Curve to think about agency and future pathways in education and research

By Joost Vervoort

For the past nine years have led a course for our second year BSc students that is all about thinking about transformative futures, as part of our wonderful BSc programme Global Sustainability Science. In the course, now called ‘Global Transformation Project’, students use the ‘Seeds of Good Anthropocenes’ -or SoGA- approach as a basis for making future pathways in different national contexts. They find radical, innovative and inspiring sustainability projects and initiatives that are currently small, niche, or just starting, and imagine what it would be like if these initiatives would flourish into better futures. Students combine different ‘Seeds’ to clash ideas and initiatives, generating truly novel projects and pathways for different domains like energy, urban heat, inclusive agriculture, river pollution, and more. Students work together with teams of national experts from all around the world, focusing their pathways on different country contexts and talking with the experts to make sure their analysis connect to national challenges.

It’s a great course to teach — we’ve conducted some research on how the course impacts students and many indicated to be both more hopeful about the future because they can see how many people are making a better world, as well as more worried about how difficult change is. Which is good because well, it’s really hard. The paper is coming soon, and I’ll update the link here.

‘Seeds’ are a great way to start thinking about better futures, because they offer concrete, tangible things that people are doing right now to make a better world.

However, they offer starting points, and not the whole story. For that, people working with the SoGA approach often use complementary maps of societal transformation. The one that we use in the course is an adapted version of the X-Curve, developed by the Dutch Research Institute for Transitions. See this excellent paper led by Aniek Hebinck (who did her PhD with me!).

The X-Curve, developed by the Dutch Research Institute for Transitions, as presented in the paper led by Aniek Hebinck.

What makes the X-Curve so excellent is that it provides a balancing of something that is often one-sided in sustainability work. There is often a focus on new, alternative pathways toward better futures, or the upward S-curve in the X-Curve. But there is very little attention for the ways in which current systems need to be dismantled, or may collapse because out pressures. And little attention for the conflict and chaos that follows, and that must be navigated. The X-Curve, and DRIFT more generally, really focuses on this.

The X-Curve can be used to do many things, including discussing past, present and future transitions and transformations.

But because we teach a course that is specifically aimed at imagining pathways toward better futures, we were interested in developing a version of the X-Curve for this purpose. We wanted to focus specifically on what strategies people and organizations might employ to move toward their desired futures. I got in touch with DRIFT director Derk Loorbach to ask if there was a version of the X-Curve, and he pointed me to a big poster that was created for the International Architectural Biennalle in Rotterdam. This poster added a second layer of schematics on the X-Curve, focused on the actions taken by various people and groups. For the course, we adapted this agency-focused version of the X-Curve into a version that was specifically oriented toward the future; and that focused on the use of ‘Seed’ initiatives. The result was initially developed with fairly basic Miro board visuals but later developed into the visual below by designer and ex Global Sustainability Science student Bobbi Jelgerhuis Swildens (an all around super skilled person).

The X-Curve (Hebinck et al., 2022), adapted for the course, partly based on a more detailed poster version developed by DRIFT for the International Sustainability Transitions conference. The elements in larger type are part of the original figure; the text along the smaller arrows represents additional details that focus more on what specific actor groups are doing in different elements of the X-Curve, and how connections between the rise of an alternative regime and the unmaking of the existing regime are made. Design by Bobbi Jelgerhuis Swildens.

I wanted to write a brief blog to make this version of the X-Curve available so that other people can easily use it. There is a lot to unpack here in terms of the different elements. But for now, a brief overview with some of the questions we ask students might be enough.

It is important to understand that the X-Curve should not be read as linear, but as many shifts happening across the figure all at once, influencing each other. It’s possible to look first at the top left, or the bottom left, or the top right (starting from the new regime), or even the bottom right (starting from what is phased out and what remains).

Keep in mind that we’re using the X-Curve here to tell stories about the future. They may be rooted in the present and the past, but we are allowed to imagine beyond the present day.

Not that when we refer to ‘the regime’ we are not talking about political power as a whole, but about dominant systems in a specific context or sector.

• Let’s start at the top left. Students are asked to analyse the current regime when they’re working on making a future pathway. What are the dominant systems in your given context (such as Dutch agriculture or urban mobility in India)? What are the key conflicts, issues and political challenges?
• Let’s investigate if there are people who are already question the current regime or dominant systems, and who might start questioning and critizing the regime, because they see the problems of a path-dependency that leads to ruin?
• Do some people recognize the issues with the current system enough that they start to support alternative pathways (going from Optimization in top left to Experimentation in bottom left)?
• Larger scale ‘landscape’ conditions, such as geopolitics, climate change, pandemics, and more may destabilize the current regime. What are they, and what are their potential impacts?
• When destabilization occurs, do people feel loss of control and acknowledge a crisis? Who are they? What do they say or how do they act?
• Do some mainstream/regime people and groups start supporting alternative networks in terms of their capacity to accelerate change (from optimisation and destabilisation to acceleration)?
• Which people feel the chaos but dig in and resist the transition, defending their positions?

Next, let’s look at the alternative pathway, in the bottom left.

• What ‘Seeds’ could be used to start to imagine a viable alternative pathway for the system we’re looking at? For instance, could community energy projects plus new ways of financing community organization be combined?
• How do we go from experimentation to acceleration — how does the initial ‘Seed’ idea or combination of activities become bigger, more inclusive, more diverse?
• How do people combine and connect different efforts to create an alternative pathway? How do they create support systems?

Next, let’s look at the chaos.

• What does it look like for people to actively start to break down existing systems? How do those involved in alternative pathways work with actors in the dominant regime to achieve this?
• Who among the people and organizations in the dominant system try to steer the transformation in a way that keeps safeguarding their interests and their desired conditions?

We’re moving to the top right — the alternative pathway becomes dominant.

• How do people lobby and organize to make alternative pathways, alternative ways of working and being, the norm — going from the alternative system to institutionalization?
• How do people in various positions build on this initial institutionalization, using their power and influence to make the new pathway the norm?
• Are there any (positive or negative) unintended consequences emerging from the regime shift?

Finally, the bottom-right, breaking down and phasing out the old regime.

• How do new practices, new ways of working and new infrastructures make old systems disappear?
• What aspects of the old system are still useful and should be kept?

In the course, each of these elements and questions has a lot more background material. I’ll share more of this material in the future. For now, I hope this overview of our version of the X-Curve is useful. We’ve used this in education but also to map out changes in research contexts, such as in an upcoming paper about the games industry led by Anticiplay researcher Kyle Thompson.

Dr. Joost Vervoort is an Associate Professor of Transformative Imagination at Utrecht University. His work focuses on connecting games and creative practices, mystery, politics and action to create better futures. He leads the NWO Vidi project Anticiplay and is a leading researcher on the Horizon Europe project STRATEGIES which focuses on the transformation of the European game industry. He co-leads the pluralistic meditation group the Dharmagarage, sings about the global crisis in Terzij de Horde and paints weirdly dark album covers for other bands.