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This publication was supported by the Multiannual Funding of the Laboratory of Landscapes, Heritage and Territory (Lab2PT), Ref. UIDP/04509/32, financed by national funds (PIDDAC) through FCT/Q3 MCTES. This work also acknowledges the support of the Foundation for Science and Technology within the framework of the UID/04292/MARE—Marine and Environmental Sciences Centre.

Transition governance approaches for the building sector have been discussed for more than a decade. Very little work has however moved beyond the socio-political contexts of the Global North to scrutinize the spatial-institutional challenges of sustainability transitions in the Global South, or more illiberal contexts. Consequently, this paper introduces a transition governance framework, a Sustainable Building Arena (SBA), that addresses the contextual particularities of the urban building regime and its de/stabilizing factors in the case of Cambodia to inform transformational change. The design of the SBA draws on the literature on urban transition management, transition management in the Global South, as well as transdisciplinary transition management arenas, and extends these concepts to Cambodia’s urban built environment. It furthermore builds upon the results of an extensive analysis of the socio-technical system and an evaluation of residential buildings in Phnom Penh, including indoor environmental conditions. The SBA is conceptualized as an informal institution and as a protected and co-creative space at the science-policy-business-civil society interface. It allows sustainability-minded but often marginalized actors to co-produce and pluralize knowledge - including the co-development of problem framings, visions and transition strategies – and facilitates cooperation, as well as the creation of alternative discourse coalitions and networks of social capital. Overall, the paper argues that such scientifically grounded and participatory processes, that are attentive to and designed for the particular spatial-institutional context, can indeed support the development of actionable knowledge, the empowerment of marginalized actors and support collective action for transformative change in the built environment sectors in contexts outside the Western liberal norm of transition studies.

Transitioning toward more sustainable agricultural development paths requires extensive change and not simply marginal technical adjustments, as suggested by a strong conception of agroecology. To deal with transition, we believe that agroecology can be enriched by a deep analysis of sustainability transition frameworks and, conversely, that preexisting theories can be questioned in light of the specificities of agroecological transitions (AET). We first examine some of the main sustainability transition frameworks (resilience of social-ecological systems, institutional analysis and development of social-ecological systems, and socio-technical transition). We identify their ontologies to question their ability to be combined without deep adjustments. In a second step, we analyze how these frameworks have been used and questioned by researchers from the life sciences or social sciences in four AET studies. We find that each framework is relevant in its systemic and dynamic approach to change, but also that there are limits concerning the balance between the various dimensions. The scales and processes linked to AET must be taken into account, as well as the way to jointly consider ecological, socioeconomic, and technological aspects. Moreover, it is clear that problems in dealing with agency are common to these approaches, which influences the way to model change. More broadly, sustainability transition frameworks need to account better for ecological and technological materialities and processes, the importance of emergent organizations in singular situations, and learning processes and the diversity of knowledge dynamics. Doing so is challenging because it requires regrounding theories in empirical observations as well as questioning disciplinary frontiers and ontologies.

More than ever is Geography surrounded by interdisciplinary movements claiming expertise with regard to the interconnections among nature, society and technology. These movements ask questions from Geography and geographers about if and how they can contribute to those movements and what form collaboration might take. This paper analyses Human Geography's interactions with research on sustainability transitions since the early 2000s to think through future interactions between Geography and research on the water–energy–food nexus. It shows that concepts, ideas, logics and methods have travelled from Human Geography into Transition Studies but that exchange between them has so far been partial and asymmetrical. Arguing that common ideas about how interdisciplinarity can be encouraged might be insufficient to change this situation, the paper develops ideas from Stengers, Whitehead, Foucault and others to explain the relations between Human Geography and Transition Studies in terms of modes of ion in an evolving ecology of power relations. It makes a case for slowing down modes of ion and proposes some ideas for slow collaborative research on sustainability transitions in contact zones. Implications for how Geography and geographers might engage with interdisciplinary nexus research are outlined.

This paper investigates the Yellow Vests movement and the extent it constitutes an original platform for resistance to a sustainability transition agenda in the French context. The movement represents a disruption to global climate mitigation solutions that are often formalized at a global scale, and illustrates cultural and economic constraints in providing social justice in the age of climate change. Using a cultural performative approach, this case study reveals the relevance of framing and cultural analyses to understand such resistance. This qualitative exploration initiates a narrative analysis to assess how the universal resolve of the 2015 Paris Conference and the related legitimacy of the sustainability discourse has been further contested by the Yellow Vests and their fractured framing. From the ‘end of the world’ to the ‘end of the month’, we investigate the rise and fall of the legitimacy of the French sustainability discourse by analysing politicians’ and activists’ speeches, historical narratives as well as visual materials of resistance in France in the context of sustainability transitions. Tip of a broader social crisis, the movement reveals an original conflict of temporalities, symptomatic of the inevitable interdependency of socio-economic inequalities to sustainability transitions. Beyond the resistance itself, the Yellow Vests embody an original exemplar for the importance of cultural appropriation within the sustainability discourse’ legitimation processes.

Sustainability transitions have formed a vast body of literature on theory and practice of transforming socio-technical systems to achieve sustainability over the past few decades. Lately, a new area has been emerging in the design for the sustainability field, where sustainability transitions theories are integrated with design theory, education and practice. This emerging area is referred to as design for sustainability transitions or transition design. In order to build an understanding of the emergence and growth of this area, this article presents an overview of origins, development and current status of design for sustainability transitions drawing on key contributions. We also provide a comparative analysis of these key contributions in regards to their theoretical underpinnings, definitions of sustainability, conceptual framings for the roles of design(ers) and premises of methods and applications.

This paper aims to understand the role of green entrepreneurs in urban sustainability transitions. We propose an analytical framework combining transition approaches and green entrepreneurship from a relational lens. It includes four processes: emergence of green entrepreneurs, multi-scalar interest coordination, empowering through anchoring, and struggling with the regime at the urban scale. This framework is illustrated through an empirical analysis of the role of green entrepreneurs in the development of the solar water heater industry in China’s Solar City. The analysis unravels how the local institutional contexts and multi-scalar relations empowered local green entrepreneurs to become system builders for urban transitions. 本文旨在了解绿色企业家在城市可持续发展转型中的作用。我们从关系的角度提出了一个结合过渡方法和绿色创业精神的分析框架。它包括四个过程：绿色企业家的出现、多层面的利益协调、通过锚定来赋权、以及在城市规模上与体制斗争。通过对绿色企业家在中国的“太阳能城市”项目太阳能热水器产业发展中的作用的实证分析，我们说明了这一框架。该分析揭示了当地的制度背景和多标量关系如何赋予当地绿色企业家权力，使他们成为城市转型的系统建设者。

The current coronavirus outbreak may provide an illustrative analogy for sustainability challenges, exemplifying how challenges such as climate change may become wicked problems demanding novel and drastic solution attempts.

Transitions towards more sustainable agricultural systems are often characterised by ‘lock-ins’, understood as self-reinforcing mechanisms that reproduce the status quo and impede change. While socioeconomic, technological and institutional lock-ins have been widely used to understand processes of sustainable transitions in agri-food systems, the role of so-called cognitive lock-ins is still under-investigated. In this study, we focus on how institutional settings create cognitive lock-ins in farmers’ decision-making related to the adoption of sustainable agricultural practices. We apply goal framing for environmental behaviour and transition theory in explaining how socio-technical conditions may shape farmer’s decision-making. Empirically, we focus on the example of diversifying crop rotations with legumes as an established strategy to increase biodiversity and soil health, and reduce agrochemical use, emissions and pollution, which still remains rare in European agriculture. We use two cases in the Atlantic pedo-climatic region, Cornwall, UK, and Gelderland, Netherlands. Using in-depth interview data with farmers and extensive supplementary secondary data, we explore how context-specific socio-technical settings interact with farmers’ normative, gain-oriented and hedonic goal frames to shape the (un-)desirability of crop diversification with legumes. This creates conditions recognisable as cognitive lock-ins: the context of farmers’ decision-making creates cognitive processes that drastically reduce the perceived viability of alternative agricultural practices. Our findings in this case suggest the framework developed for this study may help to identify regionally specific, as well as common, barriers and solutions to crop diversification and comparable practices that are relevant to transitions towards sustainability in agri-food systems.

The transition towards a circular bioeconomy (CBE) in the European Union is not without contestation. In particular, research has highlighted potential trade-offs of the large-scale production of bio-resources, for instance with environmental quality goals. To date, however, it remains underexplored in the CBE literature how controversies develop throughout a transition process. To address this gap, this paper explores where controversies are situated in a transition, how they change throughout, and how they influence the transition process. First, we suggest that controversies can be situated on and between different system layers within a transition. Second, we offer an explanation of how controversies evolve, as actors confirm, integrate, disintegrate and polarize underlying storylines. Third, these controversies can have both productive and unproductive outcomes while they unfold throughout a transition. We illustrate this understanding with the example of biorefineries as CBE key technology and discuss a research agenda on controversies in sustainability transitions.