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Abstract
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?
Highlights
We compare two different approaches to transitions of societal or socioecological systems
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 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?
Why did particular sociometabolic regimes not last forever or, in other words, why were they not sustainable? Why was there, for example, a transition from the hunter–gatherer to agrarian mode? And why, after roughly 10 000 years of agrarian societies, did a transition we call the Industrial Revolution begin, leading to another mode that is still so dynamic that we find it hard to look at it as a mode, as a sociometabolic regime of some dynamic stability, at all? And in what relation to all this is a possible future sociometabolic regime we might head for as “sustainable”? These are grand questions and they are dealt with by this approach to put the sustainability transition in perspective
Summary
We compare two different approaches to transitions of societal or socioecological systems. Depending on the reasons and the speed of an energy transition, parts of the system may at a certain point in time be under different energy regimes (e.g., urban industrialized centers may coexist with traditional agricultural communities, or industrializing core countries with agrarian colonies that are deliberately kept in that state), and the tensions that arise from this have an impact on the overall course of the transition (Sieferle et al 2006, Krausmann et al 2008) How this evolves is fairly case specific: no general theoretical guidelines have been developed. When these dynamics modulate (have a similar direction), can a scaling-up effect and a spiral effect emerge as a necessary condition for achieving a transition Both approaches see a crucial aspect of multi-level dynamics in the notion of emergence: neither can one state be deliberately transformed into the other, nor can the process be fully controlled. The approach remains mainly on the level of systems analysis and does not provide a guideline for potential interventions—this may be exactly the place where a meeting ground between the two approaches ought to be elaborated
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