Energy transitions are often studied using socio-technical transitions, just transitions and more recently, social-ecological tipping points (SETPs). While they can be important starting points for conceptualising large-scale systemic change, when applied within a regional context, they often fail to appropriately explain change. SETP concept is receiving increasing attention, but its heuristic value still requires further empirical validation. While many energy transitions are still in a pre-tipping point phase, the lack of empirically validated tipping points raises a question of applicability if these frameworks are unable to capture change at the regional scale. In this paper, we introduce a new inductive framework, Just Social-Ecological Tipping Scales (JSETS), based on cross-case analysis in coal and carbon-intensive regions (CCIRs). The framework helps understanding systemic change in regional contexts by identifying transition states. We then analyse traits in these transition states by assessing enablers and barriers of triggering factors and actors over temporal and spatial scales as well as justice dimensions. This analysis helps us to identify cumulate changes leading to four tipping scales, which can move a region from one transition state to another. By identifying both transition states and tipping scales, we can anticipate the potential traits needed for a CCIR to move towards a just transformation.

This chapter introduces an interdisciplinary perspective to investigate the transition process and to identify empirical evidence of social-ecological tipping points (SETPs) in the case studies on coal and carbon intensive regions (CCIRs) analyzed in the project TIPPING+. The interdisciplinary lens considers different modes of thought, frameworks, and multiple perspectives and interests from diverse stakeholders, a systems’ understanding, and different culture considerations across the CCIRs. Within this interdisciplinary process, we applied various lenses to study the potential for SETPs by combining insights from human geography, social psychology, regional socio-technical systems, and political economy perspectives on the phases of low carbon transitions and on the justice component of the transitions. Subsequently, this chapter gives an overview of how the eight CCIRs case studies in this book have applied various interdisciplinary lenses to investigate the regional transition and the emergence of SETPs.

A crucial task to accelerate global decarbonisation is to understand how to enable fast, equitable, low-carbon transformations in Coal and Carbon Intensive Regions (CCIRs). In this early literature review we underlined the relevance of the boundary concept of social-ecological tipping points (SETPs) and showed that the research and policy usage of SETPs applied to accelerate structural regional sustainability transformations faces three key challenges: (I) integrating theoretical and empirical contributions from diverse social and ecological sciences, together with complexity theory (II) designing open transdisciplinary assessment processes able to represent multiple qualities of systemic change and enable regionally situated transformative capacities, and (III) moving away from one-directional metaphors of social change, or static or homogeneous conceptions of individual agency and single equilibrium in energy transitions; and instead, focus on understanding the conditions and capacities for the emergence of systemic transformations and regenerative processes across multiple levels and forms of agency. We refer to these complex and place-situated processes as learning to enable regional transformative emergence.