Consolidating backcasting: A design framework towards a users’ guide

Backcasting has become a widely applied approach to address sustainability challenges when transformative changes are required. However, dispersed and contextualized knowledge of backcasting methodologies and practices needs to be systematized, codified, and synthesized to support researchers, commissioners, practitioners, and stakeholders in...

Creating points of opportunity in sustainability transitions: Reflective interventions in inter-organizational collaboration

This paper addresses the lack of attention for the behaviours and agency of actors in organizations in the sustainability transitions literature by focussing on practices of inter-organizational collaboration in the transition to circular construction. Practices of inter-organizational collaboration can slow down this transition and are...

How does learning drive sustainability transitions? Perspectives, problems and prospects from a systematic literature review

Learning has been put forward as a critical aspect to achieve sustainable transformation of societal systems. However, there is a lack of a systematic review of empirical evidence on how learning is related to sustainability transitions. To bridge this gap, we systematically reviewed 113 empirical papers that addressed the role of learning in...

The Sustainability Transitions Platform: A digital innovation platform that serves as a tool for development of sustainability transitions research and as a bridge between theory and practice

Sustainability transitions is a complex multi-dimensional research field. In this field, different frameworks exist that have grown as separate strands while they actually contain many similarities and in some cases can even complement each other. In general, these frameworks try to present and clarify the processes related to transitions of...

Transitioning to zero emission buses for public transport in the Netherlands: Bringing together the Multilevel perspective and the Multiple Streams framework to explain sustainability transitions

Zero emission buses (ZEBs) have become an important part of the transition to sustainable urban transport. In 2016 the Dutch Ministry of Infrastructure and Environment and 14 transport authorities signed a “Zero Emission Regional Public Transport by Bus” administrative agreement, stating that from 2025 onward all new buses must use 100%...

A blueprint to Monitor and Evaluate the impact of sustainability solutions in redevelopment projects of the public space: This research explores the possibilities for a system that monitors and evaluates the impact of sustainability solutions in redevelopment projects of the public space to identify the contribution to the stated sustainability ambitions

Higher Education and Wicked Problems: Students Engaging with Complexity and Uncertainty in Sustainability Transitions

The challenges we collectively face, such as climate change, are characterized by more complexity, interdependence, and dynamism than is common for educational practice. This presents a challenge for (university) education. These sustainability transition challenges are often described as wicked or VUCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, and...

The Role of Government Initiated Urban Planning Experiments in Transition Processes and Their Contribution to Change at the Regime Level

Sustainable urban (planning) experiments play a crucial role in transitions and are tangible ways to contribute to innovation and change in the long run. This paper discusses how urban experiments contribute to sustainability transitions by explicitly looking at an urban experiment’s capability to influence the regime level. The consequences of...

Incumbents' enabling role in niche-innovation: Power dynamics in a wastewater project

More pluralised understandings of incumbencies are often overlooked in transitions research, which may lead to underestimating the enabling roles of incumbents in niche projects. This study explores these roles by applying a power framework to five struggles revolving around a path-breaking decentralised wastewater treatment project in the...

Methodology to identify demand-side low-carbon innovations and their potential impact on socio-technical energy systems

The rapid diffusion of demand-side low-carbon innovations has been identified as a key strategy for maintaining average global temperature rise at or below 1.5 °C. Diffusion research tends to focus on a single sector, or single technology case study, and on a small scope of factors that influence innovation diffusion. This paper describes a...

Sustainability transitions in developing countries: Stocktaking, new contributions and a research agenda

An increasing number of studies have analysed the scope for, and the barriers to, transitions toward sustainability in the context of developing countries building on analytical perspectives from the sustainability transitions literature. This paper introduces a special issue on sustainability transitions in developing countries, which takes...

Normative diversity, conflict and transition: shale gas in the Netherlands

Few people disagree on the need for sustainable development, but ideas about what it exactly means and how to pursue it diverge considerably. Although such normative conflicts are key to sustainability transitions, attention to such conflicts is lacking in transition studies. In this paper we understand societal conflict as an informal...