Linking Transitions to Sustainability: A Study of the Societal Effects of Transition Management

Niko Schäpke,Julia Wittmayer,Ines Omann,Frank Van Steenbergen,Mirijam Mock

doi:10.3390/su9050737

Abstract

Sustainability transitions as processes of fundamental change in societal systems are open-ended, nonlinear and uncertain. Respective research and governance approaches, e.g., transition management, propose a reflexive way of governing, aiming for a number of societal effects to help facilitating a transition. Effects include empowerment, social learning and social capital development. Jointly mentioned effects shall allow for reflexivity and innovation in developing socially robust and contextualized solutions to sustainability challenges that work in practice. But, understanding the mentioned societal effects and their interplay in more depth is necessary to design and assess transition management processes. While such understanding and related assessment framework is under development in the transition management literature, transdisciplinary sustainability research can provide a rich body of tools and experiences. Building on a review of the literature, this article develops an evaluation framework focusing on social learning, empowerment and social capital as important and hitherto under-conceptualised aspects of the sustainability transition literature. This framework is used to empirically investigate the effects of two specific transition management processes at the local scale. In doing so, the article provides a conceptual and empirical understanding of how social learning, empowerment and social capital contribute to a transition towards sustainability. The three effects are shown to be interrelated, mutually supportive and bridging different scale levels from individuals to groups, niches and beyond. Results highlight possibilities to facilitate and assess societal effects, addressing sustainability as their inherent quality.

Highlights

More than 20 years after the international community agreed upon sustainable development as a major principle to strive for [1,2], the environmental, social and economic challenges addressed by it have not lost their relevance
To further address the mentioned gap, we focus our article on the following core research question: What are relevant criteria to assess the contribution of transdisciplinary transition management processes towards sustainability, focusing on core societal effects and the local level? To answer this question, we state four interrelated objectives
Ps learned about the idea of transitions, sustainability transitions, participatory methods and issues related to different areas such as mobility, energy, local economic affairs; knowledge repercussions in outputs generated

Summary

Introduction

More than 20 years after the international community agreed upon sustainable development as a major principle to strive for [1,2], the environmental, social and economic challenges addressed by it have not lost their relevance (cf. [3,4]). Recent international attempts to strive for sustainable development, including the SDG [5], are calling for transformational change Related societal challenges, such as climate change, biodiversity loss or poverty, are characterized as being complex, highly interrelated and subject to uncertainties, and unfold their impacts over long time horizons. Rather than assuming that societal change processes can be ‘managed’, transition governance frameworks including transition management, hold that sustainability transitions cannot be governed in a regular way Due to their open-endedness, non-linearity and uncertainty, they require an iterative, reflective and explorative way of governing [12,13]. When being implemented in close collaboration between scientists and stakeholders and aiming to solve real-world problems, transition management shows commonalities with other approaches of transdisciplinary (sustainability) research [12,13,14,18,19]. The transdisciplinary and operational application of transition management, that we focus on in this paper

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion