Urban youth sustainability leaders’ leadership competencies in engaging transformative social innovative solutions for local wicked problems

The complex and wicked problems of our uncertain and changing world has necessitated a need for education to foster awareness of the consequences of the global trends and equip youth with key leadership competencies to navigate and tackle the challenges. This requires inquiry into what urban youth consider to be critical in terms of their response to unfolding wicked problems. This study investigated how urban youth sustainability leaders engaged in mobilizing local efforts to generate solutions to local wicked problems, and the leadership competencies they deployed to mobilize creativity for innovative solutions. The study was guided by the following three key questions: 1) What is the nature of wicked problems which urban youth sustainability leaders in north and south global contexts engage to create socially innovative sustainability-oriented solutions? 2) What are the leadership values, skills and knowledge that manifest during the process of social innovation used in solving these wicked problems? 3) How do analyses from this study, inform, and extend our understandings and practices regrading sustainability education? Investigation of these questions employed principles of interpretive phenomenological methodology, with interviews being the key source of data. Select groups of urban youth sustainability leaders from Global North (Vancouver, Canada) and South (Delhi, India) were interviewed about the nature of wicked problems in their locality and how they went about mobilizing efforts to create locally based social innovative solutions. Analysis of the data corpus revealed that the nature of wicked problems was seen as systemic, complex, intersectional, political, and dynamic. The results include a set of 15 key competencies needed throughout the process of sustainability social innovation that urban youth sustainability leaders employed, and deemed necessary, to solve the local wicked problems. Grounded in Transformative Learning Theory and informed by the data corpus, this study’s analysis proposes a Transformative Sustainability Learning (TSL) model for sustainability competence development in youth. The model situates self-transformation as a central tenet for social transformation and is reinforced by three methods that are critical to cultivating the competencies often needed for the complex and wicked sustainability challenges – values clarification, discourse, and reflection.Education, Faculty ofCurriculum and Pedagogy (EDCP), Department ofGraduat