Understanding and promoting sustainability is one of the key concerns across research, policy-making and everyday lifestyle choices. At the same time, there is growing acknowledgement that responding to sustainability challenges such as biodiversity loss, climate justice and decarbonisation, among others, is rife with differences about what sustainability transformation means and implies across different settings, including the Baltic. The multifaceted character of the sustainability conundrum highlights a range of interrelated questions. For example, what repercussions the promotion of local solutions may have for long-term sustainability paths at national, regional and global levels? How to value ethical, political, social and scientific views on which problems to prioritise and whose knowledge counts? In response, universities are increasingly partnering with stakeholders in solution-oriented sustainability research projects. We understand sustainability transformations as fundamental to how societal, institutional, and technological domains interact towards just, legitimate and enduring arrangements. This perspective provides opportunities to reflect on the complexities of societal change towards sustainability, including who should be involved in partnering for change, what constitutes positive change in particular contexts, how change could come about as well as who benefits and who loses. We relate to these questions with illustrations from research projects undertaken in the Baltic and beyond.