Week 1 Flashcards
Gray Rhino Concept
- Large, dangerous, risks, probable events in front of us
- reaction: denial, muddling, diagnosing, blaming, panic and action
Transformation
Complete change in system: structural, functional, relational and cognitive aspects of socio-technical-ecological systems
Transition
Shift from one system to another, it is a flow
Innovation
Can lead transition towards transformation
Creative disruption
The disruptive process of creating new products
Governance
System of informal and formal rule making system
Structures, processes, rules and traditions that determine decisions and share power, accountability and responsibility
Private governance
Businesses that make rules with no direct involvement from political institutions
Geography of transitions
Trying to understand why it happens and where, if we might predict it
Deep transitions
1: Industrialization
2: Globalization
3: ?
Transitions may
Accelerate boader social innovation, new forms of collective ownership and or democratic management
–> transformation
Governance interact with
behavioral and technical change, shared beliefs (how do we see sustainability and leadership) and can on itself transform
Main research topics sustainability transitions
- Understand whether and why transitions unfold unevenly across space
- Analyze whether and how context matters for transition processes
- Analyze how spatial dimensions of local-global networks influence transition processes
- Analyze the governance of transitions at and across different scales
Differences transformation, transition and innovation
Difference of scale
Innovation: niches
Transitions: regimes
Transformation: landscape
3 ways of understanding and analyzing innovation, transition and transformation
- Technological Innovation Systems (TIS)
- Transitions with the Multi Level Perspective (MLP)
- Earth System Governance (ESG)
Importance of governance and politics for transformations
- Governance is implicated in any attempt to transform towards sustainability
- Transformations are deeply and unavoidably political
Trajectories of change
likely to ermergy from coevolutionary interactions between multiple systems
3 ways of seeing governance
- scientific concept to understand transformations
- normative program to realise and manage political change
- crisitcal societal discource
Governance for, of and in transformations
For: created the conditions for transformations
Of: to actively trigger and steer transformation
In: transformative change within regimes
5 key governance problems
- Architecture
- Agency
- Adaptiveness
- Accountability
- Allocation and acces
Cross cutting themes (table)
Power, norms, knowledge, scale
4 conceptual approaches to transformations
Transitions approach: MLP
Socio-ecological transformations: resilience and adaptability: engage, plan, enact
Sustainability pathways: research and governance
Transformative adaptation: looking at fundamental problems on local and global level
5 concepts to understand transitions better
Nonlinearity
Multilevel dynamics
Coevolution
Emergence
Variation and selection
What functions should create (8)
- Supply incentives for companies to engage in innovative work
- Supply resources
- Guide the direction of search
- Recognize the potential for growth
- Facilitate the exchange of information and knowledge
- Sitmulate/create markets
- Reduce social uncertainty
- Counteract the resistance to change
Why adopting a functions approach (3)
- comparison is more feasible
- systematic method of mapping which creates cumulative and circular causation to appear
- potential to deliver clear set of policy targets and instruments
Process approach
Conceptualize development and change processes as sequences of events
More insight on underlying mechanism
2 flaws on the concept of innovation systems
- too static
- lacks sufficient attention for the micro level
3 ways of governance
- scientific concept
- normative program
- critical societal discourse
Challenges of politics (6)
- Time pressure
- Inadequacy of short-termism in policy making
- Powerful opposing interests
- Exsisting path dependencies
- Institutional fragmentation and poor coordination
- Deficits in representation
Challenges transformation and politics (what is needed 2)
- Ex ante is difficult to do. No real vision of tipping points
- Not only top-down approach is needed but also bottom-up
Common characteristics and elements in different approaches to transitions (5)
- Multi actor dynamics
- Reframing the problem
- Importance of envisioning
- Importance of experimenting
- Importance of learning and evaluating
Proposed set of functions (7)
- Entrepreneurial activities
- Knowledge development
- Knowledge diffusion through networks
- Guidance of the search
- Market formation
- Resources mobilization
- Creation of legitimacy/counteract resistance to change
3 functions of innovation systems
- institutions reduce uncertainty by providing information
- manage conflicts and cooperation
- provide incentives for innovation
