Seeds of Transformation: A History of Seeds of a Good Anthropocene (2014-2024)

The predominance of catastrophic and dystopian visions about the future makes it difficult to envision and articulate pathways for sustainability transformations towards more positive futures. To address this challenge, the "Seeds of a Good Anthropocene” (SoGA) project began over a decade ago, in 2014. The project seeks to identify and amplify existing, innovative, non-mainstream sustainability initiatives, which we call “seeds”, that have the potential to contribute to new development pathways and create positive futures. These “seeds” offer tangible examples of how positive change is already happening out of the mainstream, and imagining how they could grow provides a useful way of describing different plausible, desirable futures and articulating pathways to move towards those futures. This paper reviews the history of the SoGA project, its theoretical underpinnings, and its ongoing impact on futures thinking, scenario development, and sustainability science. Combining personal reflections of the project's founders with a bibliometric analysis of over 30 peer-reviewed papers connected to the SoGA project, the paper identifies key people, places, and ideas that have contributed to the project. It also highlights the project’s diverse activities, such as a mobile app to identify urban ‘seeds’ and assisting in the development of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) Nature Futures Framework. The paper concludes by suggesting future research directions for the next decade of the SoGA project.