Since the beginning of the sustainability discourse, various transformation scenarios have developed with correspondingly strikingly different demands for achieving a sustainable society. Despite all the differences, transformation programmes derived from such scenarios share the central problem of hardly ever achieving the desired goals in the desired form in the face of a complex and ambivalent social reality. The key questions for science for sustainable development must therefore be

a) how these programmes are actually implemented and what (intended and unintended) effects they have in practice,

b) which heterogeneous sustainability-relevant practices and relationships of responsibility already exist independently of these programmes and

c) how a sustainable society beyond centralised control logics and hegemonic expert cultures is conceivable.

The starting point of the focus project is to make the diversity and heterogeneity of locally situated everyday practices and forms of knowledge the object of research. This is achieved by combining a perspective on concrete practices with the explicit merging of the discourse on sustainability and responsibility. The focus here is on the process of responsibilisation in the network of positions of the actors involved: How are attempts made to turn people into responsible subjects for sustainable behaviour and how do they turn themselves into such subjects - or not? The concept of the multidimensionality of situational practices aims to explicate the social, factual, temporal, spatial and symbolic references of sustainability and to make them heuristically fruitful. This reveals implicit paradoxes of sustainability postulates that have so far remained hidden by the focus of research on only one or two of the analytical dimensions. The objective of the focus project "Reflexive Responsibilisation. Responsibility for Sustainable Development" is the comparative genealogical and praxeological investigation of different transformation scenarios and associated transformation programmes, which explicitly focuses on ambivalences and the resulting social and political consequences and reflexively relates them to existing sustainability concepts. With the systematic consideration of participants' perspectives, which has hardly been done so far, the prerequisite can be created for exploring alternative paths to a sustainable society from the point of view of citizen participation. The results are to be prepared both for scientific discourse and for practical application.