Best conference papers and plenary lecture from the 2013 International Sustainability Transitions (IST) meeting

摘要

This special section presents five papers from the 4th IST conference held in Zurich, Switzerland in 2013. One is a plenary lecture by professor Juliet Schor, famous for her books "The Overworked American", "The Overspent American" and "Do Americans Shop too Much?". The other four are selected from the best-paper shortlist of the conference. When preparing the conference and reviewing the many inspiring submissions, the organizers of the IST2013 conference came up with the idea of a best conference paper award. Many societies and conferences award prizes, with the aim to identify and stimulate good work, to foster careers of young, excellent researchers, or to attract attention for high-quality research within a particular area among a wider circle of potentially interested researchers and even policy makers. So we are talking about a prize incentive, not to be confused with a price incentive. The prize awarding committee consisted of seven researchers in the field of innovation and transition studies: Anna Bergek, Harro van Lente, Harald Rohracher, Uwe Schneidewind, Fred Stewart, Jochen Markard (conference organizer) and Jeroen van den Bergh (chair). The starting point was a set of 52 full papers submitted to the conference. This may be regarded as a rather small number, which was due to the fact that no full paper was required for presentation. Each paper was reviewed by two committee members on the basis of four evaluation criteria, namely originality/surprising nature, potential impact (on policy or research), quality of writing, and quality of elaboration (methods, results, interpretation, difficulty). This resulted in a final set of five best-scoring papers. These were subsequently ranked by all committee members using the same criteria.