Epistemic Foundations of Sustainability Behaviour

Why do individuals and societies persist in unsustainable patterns, even when knowledge, values, and intentions suggest otherwise? Transformations toward sustainability are widely framed in terms of behavioural, institutional, and systemic change, as reflected in major assessment efforts such as the IPCC and IPBES. Environmental psychology has developed robust models explaining behaviour through values, norms, and intentions (e.g., Klöckner 2013), and more recent work has begun to include lived experience and first-person perspectives (e.g., Ives et al. 2020; Frank et al. 2024). Yet these approaches often take for granted the reality within which behaviour unfolds.

This work explores a different starting point. It asks how situations come to appear as real, meaningful, and action-relevant in the first place. How “that reality” is experienced and taken as given.

In this sense, the work complements existing approaches. Behavioural models explain how values, norms, and intentions shape action within a given reality, while inner worlds and transformation-oriented approaches examine how situations are experienced from a first-person perspective. The present framework builds on these advances but shifts the focus further to how that reality itself is taken to be real, and how this shapes what appears meaningful, possible, and actionable.

Drawing on sustainability science, cognitive science, and contemplative traditions, the work develops an integrative lens on how experience, meaning, and behaviour arise across disciplines that often remain disconnected. It introduces reification—the tendency to experience aspects of reality, including the self, as inherently existing—and relates this to variations in epistemic awareness. These variations are conceptualised as modes of existential awareness (Dorjee 2016; Dorjee et al. 2025), describing qualitatively different ways in which situations are perceived, valued, and acted upon, and are consistent with emerging accounts of shifts in self-related processing and behaviour in contemplative science (e.g., Dahl et al. 2015) as well as classical analyses of the constructed nature of experience (e.g., Lusthaus 2002).

From this perspective, behaviour is shaped not only by external systems or internal motivations, but by how situations come to be experienced as relevant, desirable, or possible. These patterns are continuously shaped and stabilised across cultural, institutional, and scientific contexts, contributing to persistent ways of seeing and acting.

Rather than offering a final theory, this work outlines a conceptual framework and associated research agenda for investigating how variations in epistemic awareness relate to behaviour across individual and collective contexts, and how such dynamics may be engaged in sustainability research, education, and practice. A full academic publication developing this framework is currently in preparation and expected in 2026/2027.

Most work is currently conducted at Freiburg University, more information can be found here. Collaboration, institutional partnerships, and funding opportunities are warmly welcomed.

• Dorjee D (2016) Defining Contemplative Science: The Metacognitive Self-Regulatory Capacity of the Mind, Context of Meditation Practice and Modes of Existential Awareness. Front Psychol 7:. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.01788
• Frank P, Wagemann J, Grund J, Parodi O (2024) Directing personal sustainability science toward subjective experience: conceptual, methodological, and normative cornerstones for a first-person inquiry into inner worlds. Sustainability Science 19:. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11625-023-01442-w
• IPCC Core Writing Team (2023) IPCC, 2023: Summary for Policymakers. In: Lee H, Romero J (eds) Climate Change 2023: Synthesis Report. Contribution of Working Groups I, II and III to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Geneva, Switzerland, pp 1–34
• Ives CD, Freeth R, Fischer J (2020) Inside-out sustainability: The neglect of inner worlds. Ambio 49:208–217. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13280-019-01187-w
• Klöckner CA (2013) A comprehensive model of the psychology of environmental behaviour—A meta-analysis. Global Environmental Change 23:1028–1038. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2013.05.014
• Lusthaus D (2002) Buddhist Phenomenology: A Philosophical Investigation of Yogacara Buddhism and the Ch’eng Wei-shih Lun. Routledge
• Stark H, Dorjee D, Trautwein F-M, et al (2025) Is the self a blind spot in our approaches to achieving sustainability? OSF preprint. https://doi.org/10.31219/osf.io/hs23f_v1
• Unai P, Balvanera P, Christie M, others (2022) Summary for policymakers of the methodological assessment of the diverse values and valuation of nature of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES). Zenodo, Bonn