Utopia competition: A new approach to the micro-foundations of sustainability transitions

Abstract

We present a new evolutionary political economy approach to the study of transition dynamics based on a co-evolutionary model of differential citizen contributions to competing 'utopias'-market fundamentalism, socialism, and environmentalism. We model sustainability transitions as an outcome of 'utopia competition' in which environmentalism manages to coexist with the market, while socialism vanishes. Our simulation-based framework suggests that the individual economic contributions of citizens to the battle of ideas-both the distribution within a utopia, and the interaction between different utopias-are crucial but much overlooked micro-factors in explaining the dynamics of sustainability transitions