TIMs: Transformative Framing
The TIMs framework supports the development of intervention mixes capable of contributing to transformative change for biodiversity and equity. Such transformation is shaped not only by the interventions selected, but also by how challenges are understood, how desirable futures are imagined, and how relationships between people, communities, institutions and nature are conceptualised.
The DAISY project explicitly recognises that transformative change emerges through interactions between social, technological, economic, political and cultural processes, and therefore requires attention not only to interventions themselves, but also to the wider contexts and assumptions within which they operate.
For this reason, the development of a TIM roadmap begins with a process of transformative framing. This helps ensure that intervention mixes are grounded in a clear understanding of the forms of change being sought and the futures they are intended to support.
DAISY’s Transformative framing encourages users to reflect on biodiversity and equity together. It recognises that interventions are always situated within wider social, ecological, historical, cultural and political systems, and that transformation involves questions of values, agency, participation, justice, power and responsibility, alongside questions of effectiveness and implementation.
The same innovation can generate very different intervention mixes depending on how the future is envisioned. An initiative may be understood primarily as a means of improving efficiency or participation, or alternatively as an opportunity to strengthen stewardship, care, justice, ecological literacy, collective agency, community empowerment, or more equitable relationships between people and nature. Each framing can generate a distinct pathway of transformation and a different set of intervention priorities.
Transformative framing therefore helps users explore not only how change may occur, but what kinds of change are desirable, who benefits, and how biodiversity and equity can be advanced together.
Transformative Framing Questions
Before identifying intervention priorities, users are encouraged to reflect on the following four questions:
1. What future is being pursued?
Describe the future that this intervention mix is intended to help create. Consider:
- What biodiversity outcomes are desired?
- What equity outcomes are desired?
- What forms of wellbeing, stewardship, participation or flourishing are valued?
- What relationships between people, communities and nature are envisioned?
Different visions of the future can lead to very different intervention mixes, even when applied to the same innovation.
2. What understanding of biodiversity and human–nature relationships is guiding the analysis?
Different intervention mixes often reflect different understandings of nature. For example:
- Nature as a resource to be managed
- Nature as a system to be monitored and protected
- Nature as a shared commons
- Nature as the basis of community wellbeing
- Nature as something with which people exist in relationships of dependence, responsibility and care.
These different perspectives can generate substantially different pathways of transformation.
3. Whose knowledge, values and experiences are shaping the roadmap?
Transformative change requires engagement with multiple forms of knowledge and experience. Ensure, therefore, to critically consider key equity dimensions such as:
- whose voices are represented
- whose knowledge is recognised
- whose experiences inform the framing of problems and opportunities
- which groups benefit from proposed interventions
- which groups may face barriers to participation or influence
- which perspectives remain absent.
Recognising knowledge plurality can reveal opportunities, challenges and possibilities that may otherwise remain overlooked.
4. What histories, power relations and structural conditions shape the system?
Transformations occur within existing social and ecological systems. Important considerations may include:
- historical inequalities
- access to resources and opportunities
- governance arrangements
- institutional structures
- economic conditions
- cultural norms
- distributions of power, responsibility and influence.
Reflecting on these conditions helps identify deeper drivers of biodiversity loss and inequity, alongside opportunities for more systemic forms of change.
Using TIMs for Transformation
When applied through this lens, TIMs supports more than the identification of intervention mechanisms. It helps us:
- explore alternative futures
- clarify transformative ambitions
- recognise diverse forms of knowledge, value and experience
- engage with questions of equity, justice and inclusion
- understand the influence of history, power and context
- identify opportunities for amplification and systemic change
- design intervention mixes that are aligned with long-term biodiversity and equity outcomes.
In this way, intervention categories are understood not simply as mechanisms for changing behaviours or systems, but as tools for supporting broader processes of social and ecological transformation.
TIMs therefore provides a means of thinking simultaneously about interventions, biodiversity, equity, values, relationships, power and futures. It invites users to consider not only how transformation may occur, but also what transformation means, who it is for, and what kinds of relationships between people, communities and nature it seeks to cultivate.
This approach supports the development of intervention mixes that are attentive to biodiversity and equity, responsive to diverse social and ecological contexts, informed by plural knowledges and perspectives, and capable of contributing to more just, caring and flourishing futures.