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The contemporary crises become increasingly complex, accompanied by more hostilities leading the infected societies to witness more unfortunate events, especially when political solutions are absent in war times or internal conflicts. The humanitarian sector, on the other hand, has to mitigate the severe effects of these crises on communities and provide assistance despite lack of funding and data. The action of UNHCR during the conflict in Syria has been taken as a case study due to the complexity of the situation in Syria. Contingency theory has been adopted within this study to investigate how does the humanitarian crisis in Syria impact the structure of UNHCR. Furthermore, contingency planning as a vital element to address emergencies effectively, enabling the organization to absorb shocks entirely or even partly, is adopted to investigate whether the UNHCR's crisis management is efficient or not. The study reveals that UNHCR's emergency preparedness planning is a sophisticated tool in meeting emergencies, particularly when adopting and implementing these plans on the ground and in coordination with the other stakeholders. Emergency preparedness planning has been observed to be an advantage to the organization primarily when the existing hazard or the predicable one is described as very dynamic. The case study discovers that UNHCR experienced extreme conditions in Syria, such as lack or absence of the data, funding gaps, and safety threatening. Despite these challenges, the organization developed an inclusive response action in which it collaborates with the other humanitarian organizations in Syria and involves the local communities to design site-oriented and more accurate plans.

Continued unsustainability and surpassed planetary boundaries require not only scientific and technological advances, but deep and enduring social and cultural changes. The purpose of this article is to contribute a theoretical approach to understand conditions and constraints for societal change towards sustainable development. In order to break with unsustainable norms, habits, practices, and structures, there is a need for learning for transformation, not only adaption. Based on a critical literature review within the field of learning for sustainable development, our approach is a development of the concept of transformative learning, by integrating three additional dimensions—Institutional Structures, Social Practices, and Conflict Perspectives. This approach acknowledges conflicts on macro, meso, and micro levels, as well as structural and cultural constraints. It contends that transformative learning is processual, interactional, long-term, and cumbersome. It takes place within existing institutions and social practices, while also transcending them. The article adopts an interdisciplinary social science perspective that acknowledges the importance of transformative learning in order for communities, organizations, and individuals to be able to deal with global sustainability problems, acknowledging the societal and personal conflicts involved in such transformation.