Transition Studies
Description
Derk Loorbach et al. :
"Transition studies is an emerging field of research that seeks to integrate insights from areas such as complexity science, innovation studies, sociology and environmental science to better understand large scale systemic change in societal systems and explore possibilities for influencing the speed and direction of change in these systems. It originated from a policy-science debate in the Netherlands around the fourth National Environmental Policy Plan. In this debate, the concept of transitions was proposed as an approach to better understand the failure of policy and markets in delivering a fundamental reorientation of the development path-way of modern societies and an opportunity to explore new ways to achieve breakthroughs. Since then, the field of transition studies has become an inter-national research field comprising a multitude of core concepts, approaches and intervention methods. In this paper we take stock of one of these streams of research, namely transition management, and the experiences with some 15years of action-oriented research in this area .In essence, transition management studies complex adaptive societal systems (such as societal sectors, regions, or cities) that go through fundamental nonlinear changes in cultures (for example, attitudes, perceptions, and routines), structures (for example, institutions, ways of organising, hierarchical orderings), and practices (for example, behaviour, implementation procedures, and daily routines). Transitions are defined as the result of co-evolving processes in economy, society, ecology, and technology that progressively build up toward a revolutionary systemic change on the very long term (Rotmans et al. 2001;Frantzeskaki and de Haan 2009; Loorbach 2010). Because of this complexity, transitions are impossible to predict, fully comprehend, or steer directly, but they are seen as a pattern of change that can be anticipated. These processes can be adapted to in such a way that the inevitable nonlinear shifts and associated crises provide massive windows of opportunity for accelerated reorientation toward sustainability. Core concepts in transition studies are regimes and persistent problems. The basic idea is that over time dominant and locked-in configurations emerge that are dynamically stable. Our current societal systems have emerged outof the era of industrial transformation and developed around central control mechanisms, fossil resources and linear models of innovation and knowledge production (Loorbach, 2014). They have brought welfare and growth but also our current sustainability challenges. From this perspective, the challenge to move towards sustainability is understood as the need to achieve fundamental systemic change, implying disruptive power shifts. The hypothesis underlying transition management is that (collective)understandings of the origin, nature and dynamics of transitions in particulardomains will enable actors to better anticipate and adapt to these dynamics so as to influence their speed and direction."
Source
- Article: Transition Management: Taking Stock from Governance Experimentation.
Available from: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/280394940_Transition_Management_Taking_Stock_from_Governance_Experimentation [accessed Jun 20 2024].