‘Always insightful, sometimes challenging, Strategy for Sustainability Transitions tackles global issues that have been piling up, from climate change to social inequality. The interdisciplinary approach of the authors is unique and inspiring. The crux of their argument is that the transition requires strategies underpinned by a comprehensive understanding of governance.’
– Fikret Berkes, University of Manitoba, Canada and author of Advanced Introduction to Resilience (Edward Elgar, 2023)
In this innovative work, Kristof Van Assche, Raoul Beunen and Monica Gruezmacher analyse the challenges and possibilities of sustainability transitions, presenting the dilemmas facing the path to more sustainable communities and societies, as well as proposing creative solutions. The authors deploy evolutionary governance theory as a conceptual framing for transition strategy, highlighting the importance of understanding governance and community strategy in any potential response to environmental crises.
This timely book expertly draws on a wide range of disciplines and theories, in considering the limitations imposed by unpredictable dynamics of power, discourse and affect and the shifting boundaries of what is governable. The authors demonstrate the creative potential of both instabilities and rigidities in governance. Chapters detail the basics of evolutionary governance theory, developing and applying it to transition strategy by engaging in an accessible manner with post-structuralism, psychoanalysis, institutional economics, systems theory and critical management studies. In a clearly constructed theoretical narrative, the results of this engagement become clear, in a new understanding of the weight of the past on governance and community, the construction of temporality, change and strategic change, contextual notions of good governance, and how these affect major shifts towards sustainability.
Strategy for Sustainability Transitions is an important addition to an ever-expanding and crucial field. Particularly relevant to practitioners and policy-makers interested in sustainable development and environmental governance, it will greatly appeal to students and scholars of human geography, public policy and administration, environmental politics and planning and development studies.
https://www.e-elgar.com/shop/gbp/strategy-for-sustainability-transitions-9781035323999.html
‘This excellent volume examines a key question of our time – the possibility of sustainability transitions – through an evolutionary governance lens. In addition to exploring how climate change, biodiversity and energy crises, water and food scarcity require societal transitions, it keeps a firm eye focused on the lessons that have been learned about why societal transitions occur (or not) and especially on the role played in these processes by governing institutions writ large. Drawing on earlier work by the authors and others in the field, the book introduces and applies the idea of a “governance path” in assessing how likely any sustainability transition might be and in what directions any such transition is likely to go. Concluding with a discussion of the interplay between governance and policy strategies, the book highlights the need for both good governance and good strategies if any kind of successful transition is to occur.’
– Michael Howlett, Simon Fraser University, Canada
International Institute for Innovation in Governance 