The Cluster Professorship at Freie Universität Berlin complements existing research on climate and energy in the Berlin area, focusing more broadly on the multidimensional adaptation and transformation processes towards sustainable development in liberal and non-liberal settings from a political science perspective. It will also serve as a nodal point where different area studies research can intersect. Sustainable development challenges the liberal creed of growth-based progress. Within the Cluster, the professorship will contribute to investigating whether the liberal time script will be rewritten to adapt to the necessary transformative requirements of sustainable development, or whether it will be replaced by an alternative script that offers a more effective response to climate change, natural resource depletion, global economic and financial crises, rising inequality, prevalent poverty, and transcontinental migration.