Given the environmental challenges society is facing, a concerted effort that engages all stakeholders is needed for true transformation towards sustainability to happen. We would benefit from insights on aligning diverse stakeholders’ perspectives and enabling them to increase their communication, consensus and commitment to action. As the participatory modelling literature provides such insights, I draw on this literature to investigate how it might complement the management and environmental literature on sustainable transformation. After summarising the evolution of the sustainability-related management and environmental literature, I present core concepts from the facilitated modelling literature and then start exploring how they apply to managing sustainability challenges. I propose that using causal models, which are hypotheses of complex system structure, as boundary objects helps facilitate procedural justice process and achieve distributive justice. These focus on causal models offers a novel perspective and promising avenue of future research for understanding sensemaking and decision-making processes in sustainable transformation efforts.
