The Trauma that Made Climate Change Possible: Psychological Preconditions for Sustainability Transitions

If redefining business is the paradigmatic shift required for systemic transformation (Paper II), what psychological preconditions are necessary to implement it? Despite rapid advances in renewable energy, digital efficiency, and green innovation, sustainability transitions remain insufficient in scale and speed to stabilize planetary systems. This paper argues that these limitations cannot be understood through technological or policy analysis alone, because social systems are fundamentally constrained by the psychological, physiological, and cultural capacities of the humans who design and inhabit them. Building on the systemic diagnosis developed in Paper I and the redefinition of business proposed in Paper II, this paper examines the human infrastructures that condition whether transformative change becomes possible. Drawing on insights from neuroscience, psychology, behavioural economics, public health, decolonial thought, and ecological economics, the analysis conceptualizes trauma and chronic stress as forms of invisible infrastructure that shape economic behaviour, risk perception, institutional inertia, and social trust. It shows how collective nervous system dysregulation, scarcity cognition, distorted money narratives, and imagination collapse interact to reproduce extractive economic patterns, even among actors who intellectually support sustainability. These dynamics constrain attention, imagination, and behavioural capacity, reinforcing the value–action gap widely observed in sustainability transitions. This paper therefore argues that the transition from a profit-maximizing paradigm to one oriented toward social value cannot be achieved through conceptual redefinition alone. It requires addressing the psychological and cultural conditions that enable individuals and institutions to perceive, relate, and act differently. In this sense, healing is reframed not as a private or therapeutic concern, but as a structural precondition for systemic transformation. Restoring regulatory capacity, relational trust, and imaginative possibility becomes a form of collective infrastructure necessary for change, preparing the ground for the practical tools and learning environments developed in Paper IV.