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As communities and peoples across the world struggle to challenge the forces of inequality, exploitation and unsustainability, and achieve transformations towards a more just world, it is important to understand the processes and dynamics of such transformations. What motivates them, how are they achieved, what are the challenges they face, and how are such challenges overcome? In this chapter, we share the results of the collective exercise carried out by the ACKnowl-EJ project core-team members to synthesize the key learnings from the project about how transformations to sustainability take place. This was combined with knowledge and understanding of other environmental justice initiatives that team members have been involved with in the past.

Sustainability transformations call for self-reflection and repositioning researchers’ roles in knowledge co-production. While we were investigating the transformations and resistance to fossil fuel rush in Yeni Foça, Turkey, between 2016 and 2019, our lives as engaged and situated researchers, our institutions as leading public research universities, and our country – where we conduct research, co-produce knowledge and put it to use for environmental and social justice – transformed drastically. We have witnessed ‘the dark side of transformation’ that took its toll on the environ- mental justice movements we cooperate with, on the public universities we work in and the academics we ally with, and finally, on the political landscape of the country in which we live, work and play (and which more and more frequently – unfortunately – we leave). In this chapter, we want to turn the tables and reflect on transformations based on our experiences and take-homes from Yeni Foça and Boğaziçi University in Turkey, both under intense attack from the authoritarian neoliberalism of the Erdoğan regime. This reflection, hopefully, will provide some food for thought for other researchers in other places also struggling against the clenched fists of populist, conservative authoritarianism unleashed onto their socio-natures while they try to co-produce knowledge with EJ resistance movements.

Unidad de excelencia María de Maeztu MdM-2015-0552, Altres ajuts: International Social Science Council for the ACKnowl-EJ project (TKN150317115354), Indigenous peoples are among the most affected by environmental injustices globally, however environmental justice theory has not yet meaningfully addressed decolonisation and the resistance of Indigenous communities against extractivism in the settler-colonial context. This paper suggests that informing environmental justice through decolonial analysis and decolonising practices can help transcend the Western ontological roots of environmental justice theories and inform a more radical and emancipatory environmental justice. The Unist'ot'en Resistance and Action Camp blocking pipelines in northwestern British Columbia, Canada, their "Reimagined Free Prior and Informed Consent protocol" and the Delgamuukw case are described to discuss limitations of the state and legal framework for accommodating a decolonial and transformative environmental justice. A decolonial analysis informed by these two moments of Wet'sewet'ten history suggests limits and adaptations to the trivalent EJ framework based on recognition, participation and distribution. It is argued that a decolonising and transformative approach to environmental justice must be based on self-governing authority, relational ontologies of nature and epistemic justice and the unsettling of power through the assertion of responsibility and care through direct action. This discussion is placed in the context of the expansion of the concept of ecological rights, for example through the enshrining of the "Rights of Nature" in the constitutions of countries such as Bolivia and Ecuador, to highlight the Inherent tensions in the translation of Indigenous cosmo-visions into legal systems based on universalist values.