Urgent global challenges such as climate change, and most recently the Covid-19 pandemic crisis, have revealed the importance of understanding the connections and disruptions between development, learning and education. There is a need for rigorous analysis of possibilities and hindrances of learning to “do differently” in order to change practices to ensure environmental, cultural and social sustainability, as well as learning to respond rapidly to drastic and unpredictable crises presented by the current pandemic. Learning can be investigated as a change of attitudes, values and behaviour of individuals, communities, institutions, and political systems in both national and global level. Development research, focused on societal change and transformation, bears a great potential to address these challenges in an attempt to both identify novel solutions and to engage in critical analysis.