Environmental Innovation and Societal Transitions最新文献

Existing transitions literature often highlights successful experiments for changing practices through multi-actor processes but overlooks the challenges of adjusting incumbent practices and engaging actors in reflexive learning. The current article addresses this gap through two qualitative case studies of water-related co-creation processes in the Netherlands. Each case met inertia and resistance from various actors in different forms. We examine the difficulties encountered using data from semi-structured interviews and observations of micro-level interactions from embedded action research. We find that using transactional learning perspective combined with Practical Epistemology Analysis is useful for obtaining a worm-eye view of dynamics of incumbency on the actor-level, in contrast to the eagle-eye view commonly adopted in transitions studies. Our main contribution is the identification of specific barriers to change and demonstrating how a worm-eye perspective offers detailed insights into micro-level interactions that hinder sustainability transitions.

Local governments are placing greater requirements on households to sort and reduce their waste. The research draws on experimental governance scholarship to explore the transformative capacity of local government in low waste sustainability transitions and how this is given form through engaging households in new waste management initiatives. Australia, a high-income county with one of the highest per-capita rates of waste generation globally, faces significant challenges for low waste city transitions. We conducted a desktop review of local government waste initiatives across Melbourne, Adelaide and Brisbane, and recorded interviews with nine waste managers. While the traditional service provider role remains important, municipalities are introducing new ways of addressing the waste problem that rely on actions by other parties, including households. Roles of promoter, enabler and partner are employed to experiment with new initiatives. The promoter role is an important initial stage, but the enabler and partner roles have most potential to orchestrate households as active innovation and change agents in low waste transitions and contribute to broader shifts in social norms and practices.

As Longyearbyen, Svalbard, embarks on a transition away from the century-long reliance on coal as the backbone of the Arctic community, existing understandings of place are destabilised. However, as an important Norwegian outpost in an increasingly tense Arctic geopolitical landscape, the phase-out transcends local visions for Longyearbyen and its new energy system. Drawing upon a mix of semi-structured interviews, fieldwork, and desk research, this paper examines the interconnected imagined socio-spatial and sociotechnical futures through the concept of place-framing. Identifying key actors, conflicts, and place-frames, three place-frames emerged: i) the environmental, ii) the techno-economic, and iii) the social, highlighting respectively the nature, renewable technology research, development, and innovation, and the social community as potential core anchors for the future Longyearbyen after coal. The paper underlines a need to attend more closely to the multi-scalarity of such processes to better understand the what's, how's, where's, and who's of imagined futures following phase-outs.

Authors dealing with the geography of sustainability transitions argue for increasing understanding of how innovations emerge and develop on multiple scales. In this article, memory studies is adopted to research the development of technology in the energy transition to gas and electricity within, across and beyond the Dutch household.

This article examines the monthly magazine of the Dutch Association for Housewives (NVvH). It shows that the NVvH contributed to technological innovations by memorizing technological development in historical narratives that encouraged housewives to engage in social relations within, across and beyond the household. Through historical narratives, the NVvH argued for extension of the material tasks of housewives to moral tasks nurturing husband and children. Through the narratives, it propagated the unification of housewives in a community to adapt to technological complexity. And through the narratives, it imagined alternative futures by encouraging housewives to engage in social relations with producers and policy-makers.

Current food transition studies predominantly examine the role of food actors in challenging dominant food regimes. However, there is a notable gap in understanding changes within the spaces where individuals interact with the food system—the food environment. In this paper, we seek to support the development of a new research agenda that engages assemblage thinking with the practicalities of transformation processes. Based on a critical review of existing literature, our assemblage-based approach embraces the chaotic, non-linear nature of transitions, steering away from narrow, rigid theories of change. An emphasis on the under-utilised concept of "lines of flight" is particularly useful to unveil the diverse, relational and dynamic nature of food environments, identifying opportunities for challenging, reimagining and, ultimately, transforming them.

While literature on transition intermediation is burgeoning, the implications of a sensitivity to “place” in transition intermediation remain ill understood. In this paper, we empirically explore the dynamics of “place-based transition intermediation”, through a case study of the ‘Dune farmers’ in the Netherlands. The farmers initiated a collaboration that serves as a bottom-up, non-state intermediary organization. The case shows the opportunities and intricacies of transition governance through place-based intermediation. We articulate six functions of intermediaries used in such place-sensitive transition governance: (1) Empowerment through cultivating local identity; (2) Constructing place-based relational capital; (3) Developing regional innovative capacity in a place-based innovation system; (4) Stimulating place-based learning; (5) Concretizing transition governance; and (6) Representing place-based networks. We conclude that place-based intermediation deserves attention, both in research and policy, to improve transition governance and help accelerate place-sensitive transition processes towards sustainable futures.

This study focuses on citizen participation as a co-productive and knowledge-intensive process in innovation policies concerned with regionally anchoring grand challenges. We apply a process-tracing approach and analyse citizen participation in two regional challenge-based innovation policies in the Ruhr, Germany. Local sensemaking, problem ownership, iterations and knowledge co-production are discussed as key mechanisms in the anchoring process. The results reveal the importance of a collective dimension in interpreting the local problem setting of a challenge achieved by reaching out to numerous citizens and how local, corrective and actionable knowledge facilitate the regional challenge anchoring. The policy formulation phase required the highest level of knowledge co-produced with citizens, followed by the implementation phase.

Micro-missions represent small-scale, place-based strategies for societal innovation, distinct from grand missions that target national-level transformations. They offer potential for collaborative engagement among local stakeholders in the public sector, businesses, and civil society that aims to address local needs and promote wider innovation, particularly for social and ecological progress. Despite the potential for place-based micro-missions to provide a more focused approach to tackling societal challenges, the practicalities of delivering such a strategy remain uncertain. Through an exploration of a Welsh (UK) public food micro-mission, we identify the evolving tensions and conflicts and their impact on such micro-missions and their outcomes. Our findings underscore the potential significance of tensions throughout the micro-mission process. They highlight the crucial role of regional actors in generating creative responses to tensions through proactive governance, distributed leadership, and place-based experimentation.

Fixed-bottom offshore wind is exploited as a maturing technology in many European countries. Floating wind has impressive potential for deep waters but needs technological and market development. How these two partially related technologies interact remains unclear. We address the ambiguity of these interactions to investigate floating offshore wind's development. The interactions are divided into technological or market and can be negative (competition and resistance) or positive (collaboration and diversification). We analyze these interaction types through a case study of offshore wind in Norway. Many positive interactions were observed, including knowledge overlaps and infrastructure compatibilities. Negative interactions include competition about future space constraints at ports, labor availability, and resistance by incumbent wind turbine manufacturers. Further, market and technological interactions are mutually influential, creating important feedback loops. Technologies can no longer be simply categorized as ‘niche’ or ‘regime’, but rather ‘niche-like’ (emerging) and ‘regime-like’ (maturing); hence, both emerging-emerging and emerging-maturing interactions occur.

This paper links the literature on energy poverty and energy vulnerability with the experimental focus of current energy transition initiatives and argues for the need to expand household experimentation beyond technology adoption. Drawing on an analysis of low-income households’ energy using practices we develop a framework consisting of three key dynamics, 1) predictability – flexibility, 2) sufficiency – efficiency and 3) activation – exploitation. The dynamics prompt a discussion on how conventional demand-side tools, such as pricing schemes and technology implementation programs, can be adapted to better suit the needs of vulnerable households. Additionally, they showcase the possibility of experimenting with new and innovative ways to bring about more radical change, e.g. sufficiency experiments and revitalising “forgotten” practices. We argue that the framework can serve as an empirically grounded basis for designing deeper and more socially just and needs-oriented household energy experiments needed for sustainability transitions to become successful.