Building local sustainability: Identifying critical transformative capacities

• Sustainable transformative capacity is the critical ability of society to undergo a profound and lasting change that is sustainable in the long term. • A conceptual framework for sustainable transformative capacity is developed by bringing together two relevant strains of literature: sustainable transition and collaborative governance. • The framework is applied to concrete empirical cases to explore critical capacities to make such fundamental and sustainable changes in practices, institutional structures or systems. • Four contextual and two foundational transformative capacities are identified, discussed and illustrated in the a ‘Butterfly model of sustainability transformation’. This article advances the conceptual understanding of transformative capacity among local sustainability actors. It constructs and empirically explores a conceptual framework that allows for a more nuanced, contextual understanding of how public, private and civic actors at the urban scale co-creatively build capacity for sustainability transformation. We start by combining emergent sections of sustainability transitions and collaborative governance literatures into a theoretical framework a) defining unique political-institutional transformation contexts and b) characterizing their situated capacity potential. The theoretical framework is further explored through comparison of 12 local government-led, market-led and civil society-led transformative initiatives at the local scale. This theoretical-empirical exploration enables us to tease out two sets of critical capacities. First, four contextual capacities; ideational, institutional, adaptive and experimental capacity. Second, two foundational capacities; holistic leadership and co-creation. They are summarized in a ‘Butterfly model of transformative capacity for sustainability’ offering a platform upon which to build new and more nuanced understanding of needed transformative capacities. In conclusion, we argue that the increasingly turbulent local, national and international context calls for even stronger leadership and co-creation capacities to dynamically adapt, innovate and transform to uphold and further develop key sustainability goals and purposes.