Environmental Innovation and Societal Transitions最新文献

{"title":"Between the ‘Other’ and the ‘Same’: The alterity of the alternative economies in sustainability transitions","authors":"Amparo Merino ,&nbsp;Katerina Nicolopoulou ,&nbsp;Ashraf Salama","doi":"10.1016/j.eist.2025.101030","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.eist.2025.101030","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This special issue explores the role of economic alterity in sustainability transitions. It draws attention to the ways in which ‘alternative’ and ‘mainstream’ economic practices are defined, enacted, and contested. Moving beyond binary framings, the editorial presents contributions that examine alternative economic initiatives through the lens of situated, relational, and hybrid dynamics. The articles shed light on the tensions between opposition and co-optation, and between individual and systemic change. In doing so, they emphasise the significance of subaltern knowledge, community identity, and plural imaginaries. By foregrounding these dimensions, this special issue advocates for a more political and situated approach to alternative economic spaces in sustainability transitions research. It encourages greater attention to uneven geographies, ontological diversity, and the complex relationships between alternatives and the mainstream. This special issue contributes to broader efforts to rethink how economies are made, unmade and remade, whether within, against or beyond capitalist modernity.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":54294,"journal":{"name":"Environmental Innovation and Societal Transitions","volume":"57 ","pages":"Article 101030"},"PeriodicalIF":6.1,"publicationDate":"2025-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144738916","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Governing complexity: A comparative assessment of four governance models with applications to climate change mitigation and adaptation","authors":"Niko Soininen ,&nbsp;J.B. Ruhl ,&nbsp;Barbara Cosens ,&nbsp;Lance Gunderson","doi":"10.1016/j.eist.2025.101020","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.eist.2025.101020","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Responses to ongoing global climate change include economy-wide mitigation efforts and large-scale societal adaptation that demand novel approaches to governance. An array of innovative governance models has been proposed since the late 1900s and early 2000s as scholars observed inadequacies of government-centric and formal legal approaches to natural resource management, complexity and uncertainty, failures of neoliberal economic reforms, and cross-scale institutional arrangements. Four such models have come to dominate the solution-oriented discourse on climate change governance: adaptive governance, transition governance, transformation governance, and anticipatory governance. We compare these models in terms of their origin and applicability to deal with the complexities of climate change. Our particular interest lies in how the four governance models propose to manage complexity and how they envision the role of governments as actors and law as an instrument in steering societal responses to climate change. Our analysis shows that while transition and transformation governance are often portrayed as more readily applicable to climate change mitigation, and adaptive and anticipatory governance to climate change adaptation, this sharp dichotomy does not hold water on closer scrutiny. Rather, all four governance models are applicable to different aspects of climate change mitigation and adaptation. Concerning complexity, all four governance models take some variation of social-ecological-technological complexity as their starting point. Finally on the role of government and law, adaptive governance, transition governance and one branch of transformation governance favour a facilitative role of governments, while another branch of transformation governance calls for a more involved and directive role for governments with heavy legal instrumentation and legal systemic change to match. Anticipatory governance plays more of a supporting role for implementing the other models and can range from facilitative to directive in that respect. With these observations, we hope to clarify the current global discussion over the perspectives offered by the four governance models in governing complexity in the context of climate change and beyond.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":54294,"journal":{"name":"Environmental Innovation and Societal Transitions","volume":"57 ","pages":"Article 101020"},"PeriodicalIF":5.7,"publicationDate":"2025-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144263654","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Corrigendum to “Does Religious Difference Have an Impact on the Diffusion of Sustainable Innovations? A Mixed-Methods Analysis of Ecovillages Worldwide” [Environmental Innovation and Societal Transitions 57 (2025) 1-17/101024]","authors":"Nadine Bruehwiler ,&nbsp;Jens Koehrsen ,&nbsp;Julius Malin ,&nbsp;Rebeca Roysen ,&nbsp;Lasse Kos","doi":"10.1016/j.eist.2025.101028","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.eist.2025.101028","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":54294,"journal":{"name":"Environmental Innovation and Societal Transitions","volume":"57 ","pages":"Article 101028"},"PeriodicalIF":6.1,"publicationDate":"2025-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145026743","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Municipally owned companies and sustainability transitions: Examining municipal parking companies’ roles in governing urban mobility transitions","authors":"Göran Smith ,&nbsp;Steven Sarasini","doi":"10.1016/j.eist.2025.101036","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.eist.2025.101036","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Municipally owned companies are increasingly being used to deliver public services in Western Europe. Yet, their roles in governing sustainability transitions remain understudied. This paper therefore investigates the roles and interventions of three Swedish municipal parking companies in realizing municipal goals of replacing urban car traffic with shared and active mobility. The analysis, based on thematic coding of policy documents and interviews with executives and strategists, shows that the municipal parking companies play several complementary roles in stimulating and accelerating shared and active mobility niches, but act more passively and indirectly with respect to other intervention points, such as destabilizing urban automobility regimes. It also illustrates how institutional conditions influence the companies’ roles by shaping their actual, perceived, and considered action spaces. The combination of political and market logics that characterizes municipally owned companies enables niche experimentation that would likely be difficult for both municipal administrations and privately owned companies to pursue. However, this combination of logics also makes it challenging for them to divest from prevalent regimes if the available niches cannot offer sufficiently large and reliable short-term profits. We conclude that municipally owned companies can extend municipalities’ governance capabilities, and thus their transformative capacities, especially by performing hands-on, operational activities such as leading experiments. Municipalities must, however, implement measures to decrease financial regime divestment risks for municipally owned companies if they are to substantially contribute to destabilizing prevailing regimes.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":54294,"journal":{"name":"Environmental Innovation and Societal Transitions","volume":"57 ","pages":"Article 101036"},"PeriodicalIF":6.1,"publicationDate":"2025-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144902369","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Corrigendum to “Initiating social tipping dynamics in energy transitions: A novel analytical approach for exploring feedback loops and intervention points” [Environmental Innovation and Societal Transitions, 56, 2025, 1-21]","authors":"Jair K.E.K. Campfens ,&nbsp;Mert Duygan ,&nbsp;Claudia R. Binder","doi":"10.1016/j.eist.2025.101009","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.eist.2025.101009","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":54294,"journal":{"name":"Environmental Innovation and Societal Transitions","volume":"57 ","pages":"Article 101009"},"PeriodicalIF":6.1,"publicationDate":"2025-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145026744","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Experimenting to remain the same: The politics of smart grid pilot projects in the Swedish energy transition","authors":"Fredrik Envall ,&nbsp;Harald Rohracher","doi":"10.1016/j.eist.2025.101037","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.eist.2025.101037","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Experiments such as pilot projects and testbeds are a core element in governing sustainability transitions and have become increasingly popular as an instrument of environmental governance more broadly. However, despite its merits in creating diversity and novel configurations which eventually may replace dominant regimes, experimentation does not take place in a 'politics-free space' but is always prone to capture by powerful actors and interests. Through case studies of Swedish smart grid experiments, we unpack these risks associated with the capture of the design and implementation of experiments by incumbent corporate and administrative actors. Our primary analytical lens is one of micropolitical action spaces opened up by experiments as a governance technique and part of a dominant neoliberal discourse, and the active use of these spaces through micropolitical strategies of incumbent actors in order to pursue their interests, maintain dominant power relations and shape energy transition pathways to their benefit. Four incumbent micropolitical strategies are discussed in the analysis: limiting circulation of knowledge from experiments; influencing who is included and excluded in configurations enacted; reframing the problem of low-carbon (cities); and active alignment with policy goals as a means of persuasion and legitimization of the experiment. Despite their purported aim of learning about new sustainable socio-material arrangements and empowering energy users, the smart grid experiments we investigate rather create a depoliticized context to enact a future of the energy system which perpetuates powerful interests and established actor constellations notwithstanding differences in their local enactment.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":54294,"journal":{"name":"Environmental Innovation and Societal Transitions","volume":"57 ","pages":"Article 101037"},"PeriodicalIF":6.1,"publicationDate":"2025-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144866636","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Business model innovation in food system transitions: An exploratory case study of fermentation firms","authors":"Linus Thomson ,&nbsp;Johnn Andersson ,&nbsp;Niklas Fernqvist","doi":"10.1016/j.eist.2025.101027","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.eist.2025.101027","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This paper explores how new technology-based firms innovate their business models in a dynamic transitions context. Through a case study of emerging biotech firms in the European biomass and precision fermentation industries, we analyze how firms adopt fit-and-conform and stretch-and-transform approaches to the malleable boundaries of a multi-dimensional business model design space. Conceptually, our study advances this analytical framework by integrating an ecological dimension, offering a broader socio-techno-ecological perspective on business model innovation. Empirically, we find that firms stretch-and-transform the ecological boundary through circular value delivery practices. We also find that firms fit-and-conform to the markets &amp; users boundary by focusing on low-cost value propositions. In addition, we find that technological and business model innovation are deeply interconnected, challenging prior business model design space studies treating them as more distinct. The paper adds to a growing literature that integrates firm- and system-level perspectives on sustainability transitions.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":54294,"journal":{"name":"Environmental Innovation and Societal Transitions","volume":"57 ","pages":"Article 101027"},"PeriodicalIF":5.7,"publicationDate":"2025-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144623863","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Interactions between Sustainability assessment and Sustainability transitions research: The benefits of combining approaches","authors":"Axel Lindfors,&nbsp;Wisdom Kanda,&nbsp;Marcus Gustafsson,&nbsp;Stefan Anderberg","doi":"10.1016/j.eist.2025.101019","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.eist.2025.101019","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This article explored opportunities and benefits of combining insights from sustainability assessment and sustainability transitions research. First, an overview of both research areas regarding their key ontological, epistemological, and methodological assumptions is presented. Second, an analysis of what benefits both areas may bring to the another was conducted. Finally, a synthesis was done based on recent literature in the cross-section between the two areas of research. The overview showed that there are fundamental differences between the two research areas, such as in how sustainability is conceptualized, regarding what knowledge is needed to achieve sustainability, and in the units and levels of analysis applied. Despite this, several ways in which interaction between the two areas and cross-pollination of results could be beneficial was shown. Finally, it is argued that a multi-disciplinary approach—where theories and methods are combined sequentially or in parallel—is preferred from a practical perspective.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":54294,"journal":{"name":"Environmental Innovation and Societal Transitions","volume":"57 ","pages":"Article 101019"},"PeriodicalIF":5.7,"publicationDate":"2025-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144205117","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The potential of international institutions to foster transitions. The example of the Global Stocktake under the Paris Agreement","authors":"Wolfgang Obergassel ,&nbsp;Christiane Beuermann ,&nbsp;Carsten Elsner ,&nbsp;Heleen de Coninck","doi":"10.1016/j.eist.2025.101005","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.eist.2025.101005","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Socio-technical transitions literature has so far engaged very little with the question of how international institutions could foster transitions. Conversely, international climate policy literature shows gaps in engaging with transformational change. To address these gaps, this article analyses the potential of the first Global Stocktake (GST) under the Paris Agreement to foster transitions. The article first develops a novel conceptual framework for how international institutions can promote transitions. On this basis, the article synthesises recommendations for the GST outcome from literature and the GST process and compares them with the actual outcome. The article finds that the GST sent important signals and fostered knowledge and learning on key aspects of low-emission transitions. However, it mostly focused on energy systems and failed to establish mechanisms and resources to promote actual implementation.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":54294,"journal":{"name":"Environmental Innovation and Societal Transitions","volume":"57 ","pages":"Article 101005"},"PeriodicalIF":5.7,"publicationDate":"2025-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144154453","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Blurred powers, multiple agencies, and discontinuous temporalities. A multi-level perspective on bottom-up innovation in agri-food policies","authors":"Daniel López-García ,&nbsp;Tanya Zerbian ,&nbsp;Soledad Cuevas ,&nbsp;Ana M. Moragues-Faus","doi":"10.1016/j.eist.2025.101002","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.eist.2025.101002","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>The Multi-Level Perspective (MLP) framework has been widely employed to analyze transitions in agri-food systems. However, its analytical capacity remains limited in addressing critical dimensions such as power asymmetries, territorial dynamics, and diverse forms of agency. To address these gaps, this paper integrates MLP with relational and evolutionary perspectives from social movements theory to examine 23 years of agri-food policy co-creation in València, Spain. We aim to understand (1) how do power relations influence the institutional anchoring of bottom-up policy innovations; (2) what mechanisms can grassroots movements leverage to facilitate such anchoring; and (3) what relational dynamics arise in this context. Our findings highlight how grassroots actors mobilize multiple forms of agency and operate across non-linear temporalities to advance anchoring for policy change, assuming diverse roles as intermediary actors. This relational perspective offers new insights into the strategic practices that underpin long-term sustainability transitions.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":54294,"journal":{"name":"Environmental Innovation and Societal Transitions","volume":"57 ","pages":"Article 101002"},"PeriodicalIF":5.7,"publicationDate":"2025-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144154454","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}