Scientists are trained with a range of skills that allow them to ask relevant research questions to collect and analyse data appropriately. All those years of training—in labs, in the field, and exploring analytical techniques—allows us to investigate the minutiae of complex patterns with powerful methods that lead to insights about the world around us. Beyond disciplinary training and research, scientists over the last two decades have been learning how to work together in interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary manners and modes to understand how patterns can cross disciplines and spheres, leading to a greater understanding and appreciation of complex systems thinking (Sellberg et al. 2021). Additionally, this hard-earned practice to work collaboratively with other disciplines has yielded novel methods and new insights (Leavy 2016; Nolting and Mann 2018).

Yet, with all the new frameworks, methods, and the difficult work that has been put into understanding complex systems and complex interactions, there is still a lack of definitive action when decisions are required, especially when decisions are difficult or considered ‘wicked’ (Zellner and Campbell 2015; Defries and Nagendra 2017). Even when concerted effort is put into outreach and science communication—to politicians, decisions-makers, communities, the public—decision paralysis and difficulties in reaching consensus across diverse stakeholder groups has often prevented decision-making with clear and manageable actions (Bunders et al. 2015). For example, research on climate change, like many of our long-term environmental problems, has yielded limited political action, despite the constant and emerging evidence of consequences and the consensus amongst multiple areas of research that vulnerable groups across the global community will be heavily affected (Glavovic et al. 2021).

This lack of decision-making and action has focused interest within the science community to research the barriers and challenges that prevent solutions to be developed or actions to be implemented; and this area of research moves beyond data collection and data delivery to work at the pointy end of applied science, working directly with stakeholders and decisions makers through participatory processes, stakeholder engagement, and co-production processes to understand the challenges (Howarth and Monasterolo 2017). While the above-mentioned research and methods have improved the communication and translation of science in more useful ways for stakeholders, current research is extending the scope toward developing processes and frameworks that are applied more directly with decision makers, such as decision support tools, knowledge translation, and knowledge brokering (Webb et al. 2019; Dal Mas et al. 2020; Turnhout et al. 2020; Williams et al. 2021). Experimentation with these new frameworks and processes has helped scientists better understand how stakeholders interpret information and how they then use this information to develop potential options. This research can also help scientists and decision-makers develop a more complete picture of the psychological, social, institutional, and functional relationships that are required around decision-making for complex and wicked problems to be addressed and discussed responsibly across stakeholder groups.

These advancements over the last decade have also revealed that different frameworks and processes of working with stakeholder groups dictate balances of participation and power between scientists and stakeholders. This recognition of power imbalances, which have in general been the status quo, has influenced current mental models of decision-making. New ways of acknowledging power structures around knowledge-holding and decision control have led to changes in the way science, industry, and communities work together to consider transformative change (e.g. Markowska et al. 2020; Lintern et al. 2020; Reid et al. 2021). This topical collection aims to explore some of the latest research in this very transdisciplinary field, exploring the current science and potential solutions to difficult processes in complex systems. There is no aim to have a singular and definitive answer for how to guide and effect transformative change; rather most scientists recognise that the problems we are trying to address—whether it is around climate change risk management, working with agricultural pollutants, or managing fisheries—are complex and context specific, especially because the parameters for decision-making change as the systems change.

Understanding these contexts of decision-making and the complexity of stakeholder needs and participatory potential requires us to ask more from scientists to go beyond the ivory tower and work with stakeholders in the real world. For example, in this topical collection, Celliers et al. (2023) discuss the process of co-production of decision-making around coastal governance in South Africa. They identify that decision-making is heavily dependent on the engagement and identification of stakeholder groups to balance issues of scale, resources, and power. The deliberate consideration of these dimensions was implemented to identify the most relevant stakeholders to engage and ensure intentional participation within the research process. Power, rights, and acknowledgement of the diverse knowledge systems must be given a prominent place as well when making decisions and conducting research. In another contribution to this topical collection, Orlove et al. (2023) highlight the need to decolonise the research process and ensure that diverse knowledge systems are respected in their entirety through equivalent acknowledgement of Indigenous and local knowledge, practices, values, and worldviews. They propose a set of instruments that allow decision-makers to make decisions based on the principles of consent, intellectual and cultural autonomy, and justice—these include ideas such as establishing general goals of inclusion within the tenets of projects and creating power sharing processes and partnerships that recognise property rights and data sovereignty.

The new generation of scientists will require skills, knowledge, and literacy around social and emotional responses, have empathy across the diversity of human experience, and will have to connect with people and their desire to build a better world. We may also need a different way of communicating and recognising the role of science for society, especially acknowledging that scientific information cannot represent the diverse experiences of a specific problem to different groups, and that local knowledge provides a depth of understanding to complex situations. This requires scientists to reflect and consider the communities they are working with, to think about their own biases, and to acknowledge that consensus largely is not built on data, but the working relationships that are developed between stakeholders, of which scientist are only one part. This new recognition of how diverse knowledge can be interpreted represents a path forward to finding solutions that work for society.

Solutions for sustainability problems will also have to be considered at scales that can enact transformational change, especially for the global problems we are currently experiencing. In the third article of this initial topical collection, O’Brien et al. (2023) explore how understanding local and context specific actions can scale up through the extension of universal values from individuals to family, neighbours, and society in general. The goal is to shift the framework from scaling-up change through things (such as technologies or behaviours) to scaling-up change through society by developing a set of universal values that can cascade across individuals and groups to affect change. These shared universal values would allow for individuals and groups to have more agency and power to make deliberate choices that can improve collective goals, which could then scale-up across space and time to create large-scale change.

As we deal with more complex environmental change—at interconnected scales that are increasingly difficult to govern, with more people on Earth, and more interdependencies between decisions and actions—it is important to consider one of the main points of the argument from Glavovic et al. (2021), that the science-society contract of old, where public investment in science will lead to an improved understanding of our world and lead to societal benefits (Lubchenco 1998), is now broken. This realisation presents the possibility for a new science-society contract must be forged, one that recognises multiple types of knowledge expertise and ways of working to reach decisions. This new contract also requires stakeholders to work as partners to develop solutions that can realistically create change. A new science-society contract that encourages communication and genuine discourse with diverse perspectives has the potential to reveal solutions that go beyond imagined ideals to ones that can be planned, executed, and changed through time as the situation around us changes.

While some scientists will remain data scientists, concentrating on the “how” and “why” of data collection and analysis, there must be new ways of thinking that allow this information to be connected to other groups of scientists that are actively working with stakeholder or on-the-ground practitioners and communities to ground-truth the research. Understanding that there is a spectrum of scientists from those that work apart from stakeholders to those that work closely with stakeholders, and recognising the distinct roles that are necessary across the spectrum, will be key to developing a scientific community that can re-create a new science-society contract.

I invite you to read through this initial collection and respond or add your thoughts through the ongoing Topical collection on ‘Getting to solutions’. We, as scientists and scholars, must continue this dialogue with one another in order to build-up and build-on one another’s work and develop multiple and creative solutions to understand and address these complex problems of now and the future.