Sustainability Transitions Research: Transforming Science and Practice for Societal Change

By Derk A. Loorbach, Niki Frantzeskaki, F. Avelino. 2017

1,075 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The article describes the field of sustainability transitions research, which emerged in the past two decades in the context of a growing scientific and public interest in large-scale societal transformation toward sustainability. We describe how different scientific approaches and methodological positions explore diverse types of transitions and provide the basis for multiple theories and models for governance of sustainability transitions. We distinguish three perspectives in studying transitions: socio-technical, socio-institutional, and socio-ecological. Although the field as a whole is very heterogeneous, commonalities can be characterized in notions such as path dependencies, regimes, niches, experiments, and governance. These more generic concepts have been adopted within the analytical perspective of transitions, which has led three different types of approaches to dealing with agency in transitions: analytical, evaluative, and experimental. The field has by now produced a broad theoretical and em...

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Citations in the corpus

Dealing with the game-changing technologies of Agriculture 4.0: How do we manage diversity and responsibility in food system transition pathways? (2020, unknown): “It has been widely acknowledged that in transition pathways, the transformative processes leading to new technological and economic systems, processes of co-evolution (technologies evolve with societal structures and have cross-connections with each other), selection (some technologies will not beco”
Soil as a Basis to Create Enabling Conditions for Transitions towards Sustainable Land Management as a Key to Achieve the SDGs by 2030 (2019, background): “Hajer [13] analyzed the question “how can governments exploit the potential of the new energetic society on the road to sustainability” and concluded that the path to a circular economy requires intensive guidance.”
Three Decades of Climate Mitigation: Why Haven't We Bent the Global Emissions Curve? (2021, unknown): “These lenses were chosen to complement other recent reviews on, for example, carbon lock-ins (16), discourses of climate delay (17), and interdisciplinary research agendas (18, 19).”
The COVID-19 crisis as an opportunity for escaping the unsustainable global tourism path (2020, background): “An alternative scenario entails a transition towards a radically different way of doing things (Loorbach et al., 2017).”
Designing transformative spaces for sustainability in social-ecological systems (2018, background): “Sustainability transition studies have contributed knowledge on experimentation (Frantzeskaki et al. 2014, Luederitz et al. 2017) and facilitated processes on governance experimentation in particular using the transition management approach (Loorbach et al. 2017, Frantzeskaki et al. 2018).”
Climate change and COP26: Are digital technologies and information management part of the problem or the solution? An editorial reflection and call to action (2022, background): “…of the undesirable consequences of existing and emerging technologies and IS necessitates intervention in the form of sustainability transitions (Loorbach, Frantzeskaki, & Avelino, 2017; Smith, Stirling, & Berkhout, 2005), moving beyond the existing multi-level perspective (Geels, 2004, 2011)…”