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Transformation acquires its meaning within contexts and particular settings where transformative change is experienced, and where people engage in meaning-making. We used the forest–climate nexus in Sweden as an empirical case study, and the leverage-points perspective as an analytical lens. The aim was to investigate contextual leverage for transformative change, and how our use of context and relations shapes our understanding of transformation and leverage for change. The empirical basis was a whole-day workshop, held in both northern and southern Sweden, for local forest stakeholders. To detract from current conflict and barriers to change, we asked the stakeholders to reflect on transformative change in the past and in the future, and the spatio-temporal relations that form the forest–climate nexus. Our analysis suggests that leverage associated with a transformative change in the future is commonly seen as universal and detached from context, reflecting, for example, national and global discourses on forests and climate change. Regarding transformative changes in the past, however, contextual leverage is linked to the community values and pluralism that drove the change in particular situations. Focusing on the complex spatio-temporal relations and meaning-making helps identify how leverage emerges from context, and how leverage also acquires a richer meaning for people experiencing transformative change. Acknowledgements:This research is part of the interdisciplinary project “Bring down the sky to the earth: how to use forests to open up constructive climate change pathways in local contexts”, financed by FORMAS, a Swedish Research Council for Sustainable Development (grant number 2017-01956), and by Future Forests, the platform for interdisciplinary forest research and research communication at SLU (Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences), Umeå University and Skogforsk. We also want to thank Annika Nordin, Eva-Maria Nordström, Annika Mossing and Malin von Essen for providing valuable input to the manuscript and for facilitating the workshop series of the project.