Conceptualizing, Observing, and Influencing Social-Ecological Transitions

By Marina Fischer‐Kowalski, Jan Rotmans. 2009

164 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This article creates a meeting ground between two distinct and fairly elaborate research traditions dealing with social "transitions": the Dutch societal transitions management approach, and the Viennese sociometabolic transitions approach. Sharing a similar understanding of sustainability transitions —namely as major transformational changes of system characteristics—and a background epistemology of complex systems, autopoeisis, and evolutionary mechanisms, they address the subject from different angles: one approach asks how transformative changes happen and what they look like, and the other approach tries answer the question of how to bring them about. The Viennese approach is almost exclusively analytical and deals with a macro ("landscape") level of human history with a time scale of decades to centuries; the Dutch approach is based on intervention experiences and deals with a shorter time frame (decades) of micro-meso-macro levels of industrial societies. From both their respective angles, they contribute to some of the key questions of sustainability research, namely: how can a transformative change toward sustainability be distinguished from other types of social change? By which mechanisms can obstacles, path dependencies, and adverse interests be overcome? And what are the key persistent problems that call for such a transition?

Subfields: Environmental Engineering, Global and Planetary Change, Management Science and Operations Research

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/5c4cbb7a87ba9120c2ab75596c4a5b9bf3867006

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In Environmental Engineering

In Global and Planetary Change

In Management Science and Operations Research

Citations in the corpus

Environmental education in transition: A critical review of recent research on climate change and energy education (2019, methodology): “In this article we use the term transition experiments (Fischer-Kowalski & Rotmans, 2009) to refer to specific collective innovations such as community solar projects or energy cooperatives that emerge within the context of local and regional energy transitions.”
Challenges for Social-Ecological Transformations: Contributions from Social and Political Ecology (2017, background): “, the transformations of natural ecosystems to increase yields; [57], operationalised in the human appropriation of net primary production or HANPP indicator [60], Long-term Socioecological Research [61,62] and Socio-Natural sites [63], and in particular, the concept of metabolic regimes and the tra”
Circles, spirals, pyramids and cubes: why the circular economy cannot work (2018, background): “Major changes in socio-metabolic profiles were characterized by substantial increases in metabolic rates, corresponding, in turn, to substantial increases in entropic output (Fischer-Kowalski and Rotmans 2009; Haberl et al. 2011, 2016).”
Transition heuristic frameworks in research on agro-food sustainability transitions (2020, background): “2007), Techno-Economic Paradigm (TEP) shifts (e.g. Freeman and Perez 1988; Van den Bergh and Oosterhuis 2008; Geels 2011) and Socio-Metabolic Transitions (e.g. Fischer-Kowalski and Rotmans 2009; Sieferle 2010; Fischer-Kowalski 2011).”