From Impact to Activities: A Persona-Driven Theory of Change Workshop for Impact-Oriented Sustainability Science

Impact-oriented sustainability science increasingly requires research teams to specify credible pathways from research activities to societal outcomes, while remaining responsive to complex socio-ecological systems and contested values. Theory of Change (ToC) is widely adopted for iterative planning, monitoring, evaluation, and learning, yet workshop-based ToC development often under-specifies stakeholder-specific outcomes and value propositions, limiting both plausibility and evaluability. We present an integrated workshop format combining (i) ToC logic with backward mapping from intended impact to activities, (ii) stakeholder persona development, (iii) persona enactment as a serious-game mechanism, and (iv) a stakeholder-value scaffold adapted from the business-to-business "Elements of Value" hierarchy. The format was piloted with the seven project teams of the Belmont Forum's Systems of Sustainable Consumption and Production Collaborative Research Action at the Sustainability Research and Innovation Congress 2025, in a hybrid in-person and online setting with 24 persona archetypes and approximately 30 participants. The workshop generated (a) stakeholder persona cards, (b) outcomes reformulated in stakeholder-specific terms, (c) explicit assumptions and "deal maker/deal breaker" constraints treated as falsifiable risk hypotheses, and (d) revised ToC chains linking impact to activities. Our central process observation is that persona construction itself acted as a reflexive intervention, during which teams surfaced hidden assumptions about stakeholder motivations before any stakeholder contact, so that persona development functioned as pre-engagement strategy work. We provide a conceptual framework, a facilitation protocol, a persona canvas template, and sample large-language-model (LLM) prompts with bias-mitigation safeguards. Because the complete persona and ToC corpora are not yet assembled, we make no empirical claims about persona distributions or cross-team outcomes and thus all findings are formative and hypothesis-generating. We discuss ethical and methodological risks (persona stereotyping, representational harms, LLM fabrication, privacy), limitations, and conditions for transfer to other transdisciplinary research programs.