The growth and impact of urban environmental problems can manifest as significant stress and eventual crises for cities and their residents. The focus of this chapter is on how and why these stressors and crises are addressed in cities and the conditions under which the crises can eventually result in significant environmental policy transitions and follow-on transformations. Several different types of documented urban crises (including ecological-resource, urban spatial development, socio-economic, and extreme events) are discussed and analyzed in the chapter. Social, environmental/ecological, and infrastructural/technological drivers influence the connection between urban environmental stress, crisis, transition, and transformation. The actual mechanisms that set up and orchestrate the transition process reflect the resilience of the existing environmental and policy management regime and the magnitude of the stress and crisis. The chapter focuses on describing each of the steps in the transition and the mechanisms that connect each step, as well as the key terms and concepts associated with the process. The importance of policy system tipping points or regime shifts is illustrated.

Development is complex. Individual meaning systems are dynamic, and change can happen at any age. But even change is lawful and is conditioned by one’s history of meaning making. Self-fulfilling processes are part of the nature of adaptation. Those that bring positive expectations to social encounters often have new positive social experiences. As argued in the beginning, meaning lies at the center of a rich life. Those who have a sense of belonging, a sense of purpose, and a coherent, integrated life story have what can be described as meaningful lives.

The previous chapter summarized the first three pathways: avoidance, conformance, and prevention. These pathways represent conventional and widely used applications of legal knowledge. This chapter continues the presentation of the five pathways of legal strategy by introducing the remaining two pathways: value and transformation. The value pathway focuses on using legal knowledge as a source of value creation and capture. The transformation pathway perceives legal knowledge as a strategic asset, and uses that knowledge to reshape the market or the organization. These remaining two pathways are distinct because they enable acquisition of a competitive advantage, and in some cases a sustainable competitive advantage, in a fashion that most firms do not generally pursue.

Chapter 1 raises the question of whether there was a decisive break in the nature of the city between Classical Antiquity and the post-Roman world of Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages. It is suggested that treating ‘the ancient city’ as typologically different from cities before or after obscures both the real degree of continuity and the perceptions of contemporaries of continuity. The chapter explores the historiography of the idea of the ancient city as a distinct type that goes back to Fustel de Coulanges, and has been identified by different schools of thought as religious, economic, political, and physical. Rather than thinking of ‘decline and fall’, or even ‘transformation’, a new approach is offered through resilience theory, that sees a continuous process of drawing on memories of the past and, through them, adaptation.

Taking a rationalist approach to institutions as equilibria, I develop a critical perspective on whether and when intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) promote peaceful change. I challenge the standard view that cooperation through IGOs is necessarily “peaceful” by tightening the definition of peaceful change to include not only being nonviolent and voluntary but also being noncoercive. Whether voluntary cooperation is peaceful now depends not only on the means used and end point of change but also on its starting point. Whenever prevailing institutions overly favor (previously) powerful states, seemingly cooperative change within IGOs entails implicit elements of coercion. This is especially true of formal IGOs (FIGOs) whose rules and agency are tightly tied to the interests of the powerful. By contrast, the greater flexibility of informal IGOs (IIGOs) enables them to promote change that is more inclusive of the interests of all concerned. Their greater operational capacity may give FIGOs a comparative advantage for adapting international order – and thus for peaceful change when the international order is just. But IIGOs are more effective for promoting peaceful change when larger transformational change of the international order is needed.

This chapter examines how the acquisition of material and immaterial things from outside visitors to Surama Village is used in local projects of transformation and becoming. The chapter begins with the author’s encounter with a villager in Surama who claimed to have inadvertently started becoming ‘white’ during his work with a BBC film crew. This transformation mostly centred around changes in diet and clothing. The chapter discusses how such transformations among the Makushi occur at a broader level through changing practices and how they are often associated with ‘development’ in the present. It links Makushi interactions with tourists with bodily orientated perspectival changes and shows how transformation is seen in the desires for education, healthcare, and political representation in Surama Village. Transformation is also seen in the gradual adoption of economic individualism, wage labour, and a cash-mediated economy. The chapter focuses on the shamanic aspects (particularly perspectival shape-shifting) of such transformations.

The afterword discusses the author’s return to Surama Village in 2019–2020 and describes recent political and economic changes. The chapter further addresses the consequences following the death of the local shaman (Mogo) and the elevation of one of the early promoters of eco-tourism in Surama to national political prominence. This final chapter addresses the mixed record of ‘development’ in Surama Village and the still changing nature of the eco-tourism economy in the context of Covid-19 and political uncertainties. It also further connects the book’s themes with the Amazonian ethnological literature as part of a broader examination of Makushi practices of drawing in the outside through persons, objects, and organisations. The chapter reiterates the significance of a shamanic relational mode for contemporary Makushi interactions with certain visitors (particularly tourists) in the village and the importance of these relations to the Makushi in forming partnerships with outsiders aimed at addressing contemporary challenges.

This chapter examines the aftermath of early Anglican missionisation to Makushi groups. It begins with a story that was told to the author of a past Makushi leader described by a villager in Surama as a false prophet. The chapter then discusses various prophetic movements that arose among the Makushi and neighbouring Indigenous groups during the 1840s and afterwards which culminated in the alleluia religion. These movements used material and immaterial objects acquired and appropriated from the missionaries for new purposes. Many of these movements emphasised a central theme of transformation, which was often described in colonial sources in terms of Indigenous people becoming ‘white’ in one form or another. The movements combined resistance to colonialism with Christianity, shamanism, and sometimes also sorcery. In this context, shamanism became a means for contacting the Christian God. The chapter foregrounds a shamanic relational mode that structures interactions with outsiders among the Makushi.

Chapter 6 sets out in detail Paul Tillich’s formulation of the doctrine of salvation. Particular focus is placed upon Tillich’s existentialist framing of fallenness and his understanding of personal salvation as a transformation from Old Being to New Being.

Chapter 7 contains Qureshi-Hurst’s articulation of the problem of salvation in the block universe and explores in detail her original solution. She argues that salvation is best understood as a subjective transformation.

This chapter reviews the perspectives and levels of an analysis that inform how an observation is made. This is done by demonstrating that there are two perspectives (language use and the human factor) and five levels (summation, description, interpretation, evaluation, and transformation) of analysis in discourse analysis. These perspectives and levels can be used to understand the frameworks of established methodologies, such as conversation analysis, critical discourse analysis, and narrative analysis. After reading this chapter, readers will know that the analytic process can combine different perspectives and levels of analysis.