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.

Low-carbon transitions are particularly acute in coal and carbon-intensive regions (CCIRs), which face not only technological and economic barriers but also deep socio-political and cultural obstacles in moving away from carbon lock-in. Transforming these regions requires destabilizing and reconfiguring high-carbon regimes, often demanding structural changes across technological, socio-economic, political, and cultural domains. Despite increased attention to the decline of unsustainable energy systems, much research and policy remain short-sighted, often overlooking paradoxes, trade-offs, and spill-over effects during transitions. This Special Issue addresses the complexity of sustainability transitions in CCIRs from an interdisciplinary social science perspective, drawing on nine original contributions from the TIPPING+ project. The collection introduces advanced concepts, methods, and empirical evidence to better understand and navigate transitions in CCIRs, focusing on Social-Ecological Tipping Points. Through diverse case studies across Europe, Asia, and North America, the articles examine the interplay of forces shaping transition trajectories and highlight their non-linear, multi-scalar, and justice-sensitive nature. The Special Issue introduces frameworks for diagnosing transition states and identifying tipping dynamics, with attention to timing, territoriality, and equity. It further analyzes how political, economic, and governance conditions, as well as place-based narratives and cultural framings, influence the destabilization of carbon lock-ins and the legitimacy and direction of change. Collectively, the articles reframe transitions in CCIRs as embedded, justice-centred, and culturally contested processes, providing actionable insights for research, policy, and planning in sustainability transformations.

Understanding what conditions promote or hinder energy affordability in energy transitions is crucial for coal and carbon-intensive regions (CCIRs) dealing with the trade-off between phasing out fossil fuels and deepening social inequalities. While previous studies have included household and national-level conditions, this paper addresses the research gap covering regional-level conditions by drawing from regional energy governance, energy justice, and sociotechnical transition frameworks. A mixed-method approach consisting of a fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis and case-study analysis is applied to 14 CCIRs in Europe, Asia, and North America. Results show that energy affordability in CCIRs is influenced by combinations of regional and (inter)national conditions. Whereas the existing literature and transition policies do not differentiate between the CCI sector's transition type, this paper highlights that conditions underlying energy (un)affordability differ when the CCI sector is phased out or has the option to transition. Based on the findings, this study calls for a multi-level governance approach to alleviating and preventing energy unaffordability and recommends that policy mixes like the EU Just Transition Fund consider the different types of CCIR transitions.

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.

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 novel methodology for identifying multiple demand-side innovations within a specific energy system context and for characterizing their impact on socio-technical energy systems. This research employs several theoretical frameworks that include the Energy Technology Innovation System (ETIS) framework to develop a sample of innovations; the Sustainability Transitions framework to code innovations for their potential to impact the socio-technical system; the energy justice framework to identify the potential of innovations to address aspects of justice; and how characteristics of innovations are relevant to Innovation Adoption. This coding and conceptualization creates the foundation for the future development of quantitative models to empirically assess and quantify the rate of low-carbon innovation diffusion as well as understanding the broader relationship between the diffusion of innovations and socio-technical system change. The three stages of research are: • Contextualization: surveys and desk research to identify low-carbon innovations across the ETIS; • Decontextualization: the development of a codebook of variables • Recontextualization: coding the innovations and analysis.

Transitions toward a low-carbon future are not only technical and economical, but also deeply social and gendered. The gendered nature of energy transitions is often implicit and unexplored. As a corrective, this paper explores energy pathways by applying concepts from innovations and gender studies. We examine gender perspectives and niche energy innovations which could disrupt the regime. The regime represents the mainstream pathway that includes the dominant gender perspective and energy system. We explore different gender perspectives of energy transition pathways by applying an Alternative Pathways framework that includes: (1) on-stream pathways that exist within the mainstream pathway to promote equal opportunities for women and men, as well as niches for energy innovations without challenging the high-carbon energy regime; (2) off-stream pathways that depart from the mainstream and promote differences across different genders while creating niches outside the energy regime; and (3) transformative pathways that are fundamentally different from the previous mainstream and includes all gender perspectives in a new energy regime. Applying this framing, in Canada, we explored Indigenous perspectives in the oil sands sector; in Kenya, we studied largescale renewable energy impacting Indigneous communities; in Spain, we evaluate the movement away from fossil fuels and towards renewable technologies. The framework helped to identify that mainstream pathways represented the dominant male perspective while woman's perspective were largely left out. Such absence generate energy pathways that are disconnected from local realities, lack public buy-in and slow-down a sustainable energy transition.

Quantitative systems modelling in support of climate policy has tended to focus more on the supply side in assessing interactions among technology, economy, environment, policy and society. By contrast, the demand side is usually underrepresented, often emphasising technological options for energy efficiency improvements. In this perspective, we argue that scientific support to climate action is not only about exploring capacity of “what”, in terms of policy and outcome, but also about assessing feasibility and desirability, in terms of “when”, “where” and especially for “whom”. Without the necessary behavioural and societal transformations, the world faces an inadequate response to the climate crisis challenge. This could result from poor uptake of low-carbon technologies, continued high-carbon intensive lifestyles, or economy-wide rebound effects. For this reason, we propose a framing for a holistic and transdisciplinary perspective on the role of human choices and behaviours in influencing the low-carbon transition, starting from the desires of individuals and communities, and analysing how these interact with the energy and economic landscape, leading to systemic change at the macro-level. In making a case for a political ecology agenda, we expand our scope, from comprehending the role of societal acceptance and uptake of end-use technologies, to co-developing knowledge with citizens from non-mainstream and marginalised communities, and to defining the modelling requirements to assess the decarbonisation potential of shifting lifestyle patterns in climate change and action.