Behaviours and practices in socio-technical systems and sustainability transitions: editorial to the virtual special issue

This virtual special issue relates to the challenge of connecting (a) approaches to understanding individual behaviour, with (b) the macro-level perspectives of ‘system’ used in sustainability transitions studies. Sustainability transitions studies has traditionally been concerned with the larger picture of technological change in relation to societal, economic and institutional change. Yet increasingly, some authors have argued that neglecting the micro-level details of human behaviour, practice and decision-making means that important processes are being obscured. In this editorial, we illustrate approaches to studying different types of individual behaviour within sustainability transitions frames. The papers in the VSI firstly illustrate the range of human behaviour relevant to transitions, which we categorise as reflective, automatic, strategic and/or everyday. We then further categorise the VSI papers in terms of the strategies that they use for making multiscalar connections. These options include: (i) Bridging concepts: concepts that are inherently both social and individual; (ii) Integrative perspectives: theoretical or conceptual approaches that inherently connect individual and social processes by design; (iii) Multiscale linkages: multi-scale process-tracing within a sociotechnical change process; (iv) Multi-lens or parallel linkages: multiple theoretical lenses and/or methods used in series or parallel. Taken together, the papers in the VSI illustrate the use of these approaches, as they seek to make connections between individual behaviour and the wider sociotechnical contexts in which this takes place.