Designing transformative spaces for sustainability in social-ecological systems

Transformations toward sustainability have recently gained traction, triggered in part by a growing recognition of the dramatic socio-cultural, political, economic, and technological changes required to move societies toward more desirable futures in the Anthropocene. However, there is a dearth of literature that emphasizes the crucial aspects of sustainability transformations in the diverse contexts of the Global South. Contributors to this Special Feature aim to address this gap by weaving together a series of case studies that together form an important navigational tool on the “how to” as well as the “what” and the “where to” of sustainability transformations across diverse challenges, sectors, and geographies. They propose the term “transformative space” as a “safe-enough” collaborative process whereby actors invested in sustainability transformations can experiment with new mental models, ideas, and practices that can help shift social-ecological systems onto more desirable pathways. The authors also highlight the challenges posed to researchers as they become “transformative space-makers,” navigating the power dynamics inherent in these processes. Because researchers and practitioners alike are challenged to provide answers to complex and often ambiguous or incomplete questions around sustainability, the ideas, reflections and learning gathered in this Special Feature provide some guidance on new ways of engaging with the world

Designing a knowledge co-production operating space for urban environmental governance lessons from Rotterdam, Netherlands and Berlin, Germany

Challenges for a sustainable urban development are increasingly important in cities because urbanization and related land take come up with negative challenges for the environment and for city residents. Searching for successful solutions to environmental problems requires combined efforts of different scientific disciplines and an active dialogue between stakeholders from policy and society. In this paper, we present a comparative assessment of the way policy-science dialogues have achieved knowledge co-production about strategic urban environmental governance action using the cities of Berlin in Germany and Rotterdam in the Netherlands as case studies. The ecosystem services framework is applied as a lens for policy-science interaction and a 'knowledge co-production operating space' is introduced. We show how policy officers, urban planners, practitioners and scientists learned from each other, and highlight the impact of this knowledge co-production for governance practice. We found that the concerted collaboration and co-creation between researchers and policy officers have led to mutual learning and establishment of relationships and trust in both cities. Not only the policy-relevance of research and its policy uptake were achieved but also new insights for research blind spots were created. In our conclusions we reflect on co-production processes with two types of conditions that we introduced to be most influential in the way knowledge can be co-created. These are conditions that relate to the way knowledge co-production processes are set-up and, conditions that relate to the expected value or benefit that the co-produced knowledge will bring across society, policy and practice

The sour and sweet grapes of an institutional transition: Impacts of institutional transition on public policy design in water management sector in the Netherlands

The last decade a general shift has been realized in the water management sector in the Netherlands. The shift from a top-down (cooperative monopoloid) to a bottom-up institutional setting (cooperative multi-centric) was accompanied by various effects on the societal context. The benefits of the institutional shift do not only involve the most important actors (e.g. the Ministry of Transport and Water Management, the Municipalities) but also allows them to achieve their goals. The disadvantages of the institutional shift concern the long duration of the policy design process since issues and perceptions are steered in multiple phases and negotiated at all levels of institutional structuration. These undesirable effects can be considered as the impacts of the institutional transitions and can be alleviated by a more thorough design of the policy design process along the administrative layers as well as by the sustaining of openness and diversity of actors in the policy design process. The fruitful cooperative climate between the involved administrative bodies of water management sectors need to be conserved for forthcoming water policy challenges

Steering transformations under climate change

In light of the persistent failure to reduce emissions decisively, facilitate long-term resilience against climate change and account for the connectedness of climate change with other social, environmental and economic concerns, we present a conceptual framework of capacities for transformative climate governance. Transformative climate governance enables climate mitigation and adaptation while purposefully steering societies towards low-carbon, resilient and sustainable objectives. The framework provides a systematic analytical tool for understanding and supporting the already ongoing changes of the climate governance landscape towards more experimental approaches that include multi-scale, cross-sectoral and public-private collaborations. It distinguishes between different types of capacities needed to address transformation dynamics, including responding to disturbances (stewarding capacity), phasing-out drivers of path dependency (unlocking capacity), creating and embedding novelties (transformative capacity) and coordinating multi-actor processes (orchestrating capacity). Our case study of climate governance in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, demonstrates how the framework helps to map the activities by which multiple actors create new types of conditions for transformative climate governance, assess the effectiveness of the capacities and identify capacity gaps. Transformative and orchestrating capacities in Rotterdam emerged through the creation of space and informal networks for strategic and operational innovation, which also propelled new types of governance arrangements and structures. Both capacities support stewarding and unlocking by integrating and mainstreaming different goals, connecting actors to each other for the development of solutions and mediating interests. Key challenges across capacities remain because of limited mainstreaming of long-term and integrated thinking into institutional and regulatory frameworks. As the ongoing changes in climate governance open up multiple questions about actor roles, effective governance processes, legitimacy and how effective climate governance in the context of transformations can be supported, we invite future research to apply the capacities framework to explore these questions

Discovering sustainability: A transition approach towards sustainable development

Abstract The concepts of transition and transition management offer a fruitful context for cooperation and debate among scientists, policy makers, and corporate actors. Transition management and transition approach in general provide an integrative approach to analyze and formulate an unconventional pathway towards sustainability. Transitions’ approach is not to achieve fixed goals, but to gradually work towards common ambitions through innovation, integration, and co-evolution. A transition to sustainability is an open-ended societal process of fundamental change in structure, culture and practices that comply with the sustainability values. In this paper we address not only what is a transitions’ approach, but also what transition management can offer to policy makers who position sustainability at the core of the development. Process-oriented tenets of transition management as well as propositions in face of global and local challenges to sustainability are analyzed

A transition research perspective on governance for sustainability

In this paper we present the transition approach as an integrated perspective to understand and possibly orient our society towards sustainable development. Transition management is based upon complex adaptive system thinking and seeks to deal with ongoing changes in society in an evolutionary manner so as to influence these ongoing changes in terms of speed and direction: towards sustainability. Since the concept of sustainability is inherently normative, subjective and ambiguous, we argue that (unlike some more traditional approaches to sustainable development) we should focus on an open facilitation and stimulation of social processes towards sustainability. Transition perspective poses novel challenges for research: there are no unequivocal answers, nor is it clear how these processes should be governed. We thus end this paper by formulating the basic research questions central to the search for governance for sustainability

Wanting it all - is a stakeholders' Vision for Europen comaptaible with meeting Europe's food demand under high end climate change

Responding to climate change requires a desirable endpoint or vision against which to plan adaptation and mitigation and to determine `success'. Climate change impact, adaptation and vulnerability (CCIAV) models are useful tools to assess the consequences of adaptation in reducing the potential impacts of climate change. However, to date most CCIAV studies have had two significant limitations - (1) the lack of a clearly defined Vision and (2) a lack of contextualisation of adaptation according to the constraints (and opportunities) of alternative socio-economic futures. This paper describes how a European integrated assessment platform (the IMPRESSIONS integrated assessment platform or IAP), downscaled European Shared Socio-economic Pathways (Euro-SSPs) and a structured stakeholder engagement process of adaptation planning and Visioning have been brought together to provide a rich understanding of the adaptation challenges facing Europe. A scenario-neutral multi-dimensional Vision for Europe in 2100 (encapsulating such factors as equity, lifestyle, governance, resilience, environment, food, water and energy) was derived by stakeholders, who then developed preliminary adaptation, mitigation and transformational pathways to achieve the Vision within the context of the individual Euro-SSPs. The multi-sectoral IMPRESSIONS IAP was then used to assess the ability of the pathways to achieve selected indicators of the Vision. The results demonstrate the very different challenges and opportunities for Europe over the coming century posed by the Euro-SSPs and the synergies and trade-offs between meeting Europe's food demand under climate change and other desirable aspects of the Vision

Co-producing urban sustainability transitions knowledge with community, policy and science

This viewpoint presents insights on designing, engaging with and researching multi-stakeholder engagement spaces based on the experience of the ARTS project (2014–2016), active in five European cities also relevant for a broader European scale. We argue that those spaces represent an important new instrument of participatory governance that can elucidate the way different actors like community initiatives relate to and employ planning and policy contexts for working towards sustainable urban futures. The multi-stakeholder engagement spaces are analyzed regarding three functions they fulfill: co-creating new knowledge for action, making sense of contemporary transitions, and, exploring how sustainable solutions impact transitions. The lessons learned focus on the roles of different actors within those spaces as well as the link between the multi-stakeholder engagement spaces and a broader local context. We name three caveats including deeply entrenched mistrust between local transition initiatives and local government representatives, existing power imbalances and inclusivity

Discursive regime dynamics in the Dutch energy transition

Since its introduction in the National Environmental Policy Plan in 2001 the notion of 'energy transition' is firmly rooted in the Dutch energy debate. Despite political efforts to shift to a sustainable energy system, the Netherlands is lagging behind other European countries. Scholarly literature generally ascribes such slow developments to the dominant role of incumbents. In this paper we explore how prominent incumbents of the Dutch energy system discursively frame the energy transition by unravelling their existing and evolving storylines. Our results show that decarbonization in the context of a European energy market is currently seen as the dominant driver for the energy transition, linked to discursive elements on keeping the energy supply secure and affordable. We found tensions within this dominant storyline and emerging storylines with the potential to undermine the dominant one. In response, incumbents are discursively repositioning themselves, thereby restructuring coalitions - possibly indicating discursive regime destabilization