by Willem Colenbrander (Kulima Integrated Development Solutions)
September 12, 2025

The Transformations Community/Earth Systems Governance (TC/ESG2025) conference  was a meeting of researchers from all over the world who are examining the necessity of transforming the current systems prevalent in the world to a future that is more sustainable. The conference took place at The Wanderers Club in Johannesburg. In the opening ceremony, the colonial and apartheid history of the building was highlighted.  All the pictures in the club showed the white community that had created and maintained the apartheid system in South Africa. But times have changed since the end of apartheid, and the South Africans I met were a completely new generation, which fitted well in the theme of this conference.

TSG/ESG2025 did not feel like a standard academic conference with paper and poster presentations. It was an experience which I've never gone through during my 50 years in Africa.  I started every day with guided movement and meditation exercises, linked to the conference themes. I attended sessions where ongoing and completed research was presented in terms of transformation and sustainability. Half of the time, I attended films and theatre.

There was the Empatheatre performance, “Unruly”, showing how communities can live in and protect the natural environment, in this case baboons, and how other parts of those communities see that environment as a threat to their ways of life. Empatheatre is a research-based, theatre-making methodology that aims to create new social spaces for empathy, which is often necessary to promote transformations.

I also attended a screening of the film Blue Burning. When the Shell petroleum company announced in 2021 that it wanted to explore for fossil fuels off South Africa’s pristine Wild Coast, indigenous communities immediately fought back through the country’s courts. The Makhanda High Court ruled in favour of the communities, citing inadequate public consultation and failure to consider environmental and cultural impacts.

Lessons I learnt for FoSTA Health

Participating in the conference made me reflect upon the learnings and their relevance for FoSTA-Health.

On the one hand, we have gradually maturing democracies in Africa. During the closing plenary, one speaker showed a slide where countries of the world were ranked from full democracies to authoritarian regimes:

At the same time, there is the dominance of the “Big Four” cartel of agro-chemical firms that control over 60% of global seed and agrochemical markets. These are the post-second world war chemical industries that repurposed military technologies for farming.

In her plenary presentation, reflecting on the IPBES Transformative Change Assessment, Karen O’Brien noted that one of the overarching challenges to transformative change is  “…persistent relations of dominations, especially those that were propagated in colonial times.”

On the other hand, the existence of the conference shows a commitment to change.  The organisers of TC/ESG2025 were:

• The Transformations Community, a global network of action researchers and reflective practitioners dedicated to fostering transformations toward equitable, sustainable and regenerative futures
• The Earth System Governance Project, a global, interdisciplinary research network advancing knowledge at the interface between global environmental change and governance
• Wits University in South Africa, known for its historical role in advancing democracy and human rights, while maintaining strong partnerships with industry, government and communities

Similarly, in my own role of engaging stakeholders within FoSTA-Health, I have come across progressive communities and organisations. These include farmers that have changed from inorganic to organic farming because they realise that it is healthier for their soils and themselves. It also includes people in urban areas that have started growing their own food or buying organic produce, because they see the increase in non-communicable diseases in their own community.

Attending the TC/ESG2025 Conference has made me more convinced that One Health outcomes will influence transformations as communities will decide what healthy food systems are going to look like in future. The communities will eventually be key in enabling the leverage points that determine which of the FoSTA-Health Representative Transformation Pathways end up best representing our future.