There have been many calls to address the urgent and critical challenges of global change, as exemplified by the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the planetary boundaries discourse. The motivations for and processes of societal change at different spatial scales and multiple governance levels, however, have not been addressed adequately. KLASICA addresses these issues through interdisciplinary and trans-disciplinary (i.e., in open, integral collaboration with stakeholders) research and actions to:

• improve understanding of the interaction between knowledge production, learning processes, and collective social change and,
• use that understanding to enhance the capacity of stakeholders at various governance levels to make informed and effective decisions on policy and practice for sustainable futures.

A new, concerted effort to understand these fundamental issues of societal transformations as collective behaviour changes toward sustainable futures through the wide range of intellectual lenses of art, humanities, social and natural sciences is urgently needed.
This is precisely what KLASICA sets out to do. The Alliance was formally approved as an international research and action alliance by the International Human Dimensions Programme in Global Environmental Change (IHDP) in 2011. In 2015, a home base for the alliance was established at the Potsdam-based Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies (IASS). KLASICA is fundamentally aligned with the mission and vision of IASS in that it is uniquely focused on understanding and fostering processes of culturally and contextually-appropriate collective transformative change to just and equitable sustainable futures.