We are living in an era of metacrisis, where human-induced climate change, ecosystem degradation, mass extinction and multiple injustices are symptoms of something deeper and more disturbing (Stein et al., Reference Stein, Andreotti, Suša, Ahenakew and Čajková2022). Planetary boundaries continue to be exceeded yet many humans seem unwilling to accept, or to be able to enact, the depth of transformation necessary to arrest, repair or regenerate the damage. Our attachments to modern/colonial habits of existence (Machado de Oliveira, Reference Machado de Oliveira2021) keep us entangled in ways of being, knowing and relating that are rooted in the belief that humans are separate from place, kin and each other.

I explore leadership as a response to this metacrisis in my PhD thesis, Towards leadership for planetary wellbeing: Reimagining practice in critical times (Sutton, Reference Sutton2024). Drawing on a body of work, including publications and creative works, the exegesis offers insights into what is involved in transforming leadership practice through embodied and affective ways of being, knowing and relating that are often silenced in systems and structures of modernity/coloniality (Stein et al., Reference Stein, Andreotti, Suša, Ahenakew and Čajková2022). I was especially interested in practices that can support communities to restore and deepen relations with place (Sutton et al., Reference Sutton, Bellingham and White2023) as crucial first steps in interrupting the denial of entanglement (Machado de Oliveira, Reference Machado de Oliveira2021) that co-constitutes the metacrisis.

The research aligns with scholarship that suggests cultivating capacities for deep conscious connection with Place, kin and ourselves can support a “profound shift in perspectives towards a more relational paradigm” (Wamsler, Reference Wamsler, Osberg, Janss and Stephan2023, p. 3). At the same time it challenges emerging research, scholarship and frameworks for sustainability leadership such as the Inner Development Goals (Wamsler et al., Reference Wamsler, Osberg, Janss and Stephan2023) because it is informed by a kin-centric worldview and grounded in ontological understanding of relationality that considers humans to be part of, rather than separate from, a living, breathing planetary ecology. Poetry, narrative, painting and photography (e.g. Figure 1) are woven into the exegesis to honour the profoundly relational nature of this work and to acknowledge response-ability as the “ability to respond to an agential, living, emotional landscape through our relationships, reciprocity and senses” (Poelina et al., Reference Poelina, Wooltorton, Blaise, Aniere, Horwitz, White and Muecke2022, 5).

Figure 1.

Encountering a grassy plain. Wurundjeri Country (Sherbrooke Forest) December 2024. Photo: B.Sutton.

Wave One opens by framing the context of metacrisis and describing the ethico-onto-epistemological grounding of the research. I explain that the research emerged from my situated knowledge of sustainability leadership and my experience of leading public-sphere environmental education and communications programs designed to engage communities in change. What began as a self-study of practice (Strom et al., Reference Strom, Mills, Abrams and Dacey2018) became multiple waves of embodied, relational inquiry focused on reimaging sustainability leadership in these critical times.

In Wave Two I think with publications produced during the research (see below for the full list) to theorise leadership for planetary wellbeing as a relational, response-able, reciprocal form of community leadership that has a purpose of reorienting lifeways towards relationality, with decolonial intent. I offer six entangled dimensions for educators to attend to in enacting leadership for planetary wellbeing (context, purpose, place, community, positionality and praxis) and highlight five capacities needed for living, learning and leading relationally. These include:

• • Cultivating an ethic of care and love for kin.

• • Developing deep, conscious connections with place, kin, community and ourselves.

• • Deepening our capacities for embodied and affective ways of knowing, being and relating.

• • Finding spaces of belonging and collaboration where we can do the work together.

• • Cultivating critical curiosity and consciousness about what is informing our approaches to leadership.

Wave Three extends on this theorising to consider the type of leadership development needed and necessary in this era of ongoing metacrisis. I propose critical embodied relational work as a transformative, ethical and regenerative approach to leadership development. I detail how this approach can address silences present in emerging and contemporary frameworks of development focusing on inner or self-work, such as the Inner Development Goals. I further propose that doing the work of leadership development within learning communities, through structured informal learning, can support leaders to cultivate the capacities and response-abilities needed lead in ways geared towards planetary wellbeing.

Wave four speaks to the contribution this work makes to environmental education, leadership, practice and scholarship. As a transformative leadership development praxis, leadership for planetary wellbeing becomes a way of being in leadership: a praxis for radical reworlding. Radical because it celebrates and honours embodied, affective, located, relational ways of living, learning and leading that appear absent but are always, already possible. Reworlding, because through repeated waves, spirals and cycles it enables co-becoming in reciprocal relations towards the possibilities of multispecies thriving.