Sustainability transitions in the making: A closer look at actors, strategies and resources

摘要

Modern societies face fundamental sustainability problems in several domains, such as energy, transportation and food. 'Technological fixes' have often provided only temporary and partial solutions due to negative externalities, rebound effects or other unintended consequences (see e.g. [1,2]). In fact, some solutions reinforced technological and institutional lock-in, thus strengthening existing systems [3]. It has therefore been suggested that societies need to fundamentally restructure systems of consumption and production by initiating so-called sustainability transitions [1,4,5]. Whereas it is known that such transformation processes are sluggish and unfold over many decades, the nature of sustainability problems requires imminent action.