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This editorial introduces a special issue with 27 short viewpoints about future research on transition studies, to commemorate the 10th anniversary of this journal.

Summary The diversity of local conditions across regions has led to numerous challenges and opportunities for the implementation of global sustainability frameworks such as the Sustainable Development Goals. A grassroots transformative change led by local communities, cities, and businesses can offer a promising approach for achieving sustainability, tailored to the unique conditions of each context. Drawing on a systematic review of scientific and policy experiences, we explore some of the major challenges in local sustainability such as disagreements on local priorities, competing interests among various cohorts of stakeholders, and the risks posed by future uncertainties. We propose a transdisciplinary agenda based on the effective integration of computational approaches with genuine stakeholder engagement to mitigate these challenges. The proposed agenda is crucial for mobilizing collaborative efforts that enhance co-learning between scientists and stakeholders in the pursuit of sustainability across scales.

Urban transitions and transformations research fosters a dialogue between sustainability transitions theory an inter- and transdisciplinary research on urban change. As a field, urban transitions and transformations research encompasses plural analytical and conceptual perspectives. In doing so, this field opens up sustainability transitions research to new communities of practice in urban environments, including mayors, transnational municipal networks, and international organizations.

Environmental Research Letters, 15 (8), ISSN:1748-9326, ISSN:1748-9318

The inability of global governments to meaningfully progress sustainable development over the past three decades is deeply concerning. AI is increasingly framed as a solution for achieving such outcomes, sometimes uncritically. We argue that: 1) for AI to improve public decision-making, the conditions and factors influencing public decisions must be better understood and considered; 2) to mainstream AI-enabled insights, transformations of those conditions and factors are necessary; and, 3) critical governance questions about those transformations must be addressed. To develop our arguments we draw on: original research identifying factors shaping public decision-making; ongoing interdisciplinary research exploring conditions that influence the use of AI for sustainable development policy; and, conceptual framings from literature concerned with transitions, earth system governance, leverage points and policy entrepreneurship - all sharing ambition to understand transformative change. In so doing, we seek to advance critical knowledge on the, potentially, transformative implications of AI in public decision-making.

The future of cycling is about to change. At least, this is apparent if we are to believe the multitude of innovators, start-ups, incumbent industries, policy actors and consultants proposing to harness the power of digital techniques to improve and transform cycling experiences, infrastructures, and gadgets. This ‘smartification of cycling’ is a phenomenon that is increasingly attracting attention and a variety of interests, fuelled both by the processes of transitioning to smart mobility and a boom of attention to cycling in cities worldwide. However, proposed cycling futures, both implicit and explicit, receive little critical scrutiny. Here, we fill this gap by mapping smart cycling innovations and their key features. We examine how innovations are believed to change the way cycling is practiced, made sense of and governed. Using a constructivist grounded theory approach, we analyse 86 website texts of smart cycling innovations and systematically outline changes envisioned by innovators. Having identified tensions between and within a range of promised futures, we conclude that smart cycling futures are multiple and contested, just as cycling presents are. Therefore, we propose a number of questions for further research to advance a more nuanced understanding of the range of futures of smart cycling in academic thinking and potentially to support decision-making at different levels of governance. Understanding diverse, contested, embodied and embedded cycling presents is part and parcel of imagining and co-creating (smart) cycling futures.

Current sustainability challenges call for transitions in locked-in socio-technical systems. The governance of transitions often remains limited to the cultivation of sustainable ‘niche’ innovations, however. This paper explores how to handle transitions directionality, i.e. the diversity of possible socio-technical development paths. It reaches beyond hitherto rather abstract and fragmented insights. STS, political-science and systems-evolutionary angles are combined into an integrative framework. Concrete directionality challenges are identified through the analysis of socio-technical multiplicity, divergent normative appraisals and process dynamics. The driverless car transition provides an exemplar case. As highlighted through qualitative evidence from the Dutch Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) sector, common innovation discourses of a ‘race to automation’ misrepresent the pace and direction of the nascent transition. The transition requires much more than the cultivation of driverless vehicles: Next to the commercial development of vehicle automation, it involves governmental traffic management ambitions and public-private collaboration towards ‘cooperative systems’. Other insights on directionality-conscious transitions governance pertain to the sustained synchronization between institutionally diverse actors, and to the changing material conditions for steering. The overall conclusion is that the framework provides a useful lens to explore the governance of directionality in socio-technical transitions. Future studies should explore its usefulness beyond the ITS domain., SCOPUS: ar.j, info:eu-repo/semantics/published

This book has sought to advance the theorisation of the interface between experimentation, socio-technical transitions and the city, through an internationally comparative empirical analysis of ULL. This has been structured through three core elements. First, through a set of conceptually informed empirical case studies from Africa, Asia, Europe and North America, based on original empirical work through case studies and interviews with municipal staff, private sector repre - sentatives, activists and civic communities, technologists, developers and others involved in the making of ULL. Second, by undertaking a critical examination of the discourses and practices associated with ULL, including an evaluation of what new capabilities are being created by whom and with what exclusions; how these are being developed and contested; where this is happening both within and between cities and, with what sorts of socio-economic, political, environmental and material consequences. Third, by developing an original framework informed by the body of work on transitions theory and work on urban governance and politics. The risk of such an approach is theoretical eclecticism. To counter this risk, the framework focused on a set of core concerns across different approaches and sought to identify the common ground they share: the design, practices and processes of ULL. In developing this concluding chapter, we follow the structure of the book and consider how our comparative, critical analysis of ULL provides new insights into their design and practice, and the processes through which they come to be embedded in sustainability transitions. In each section, we summarise the main findings, examining how the chapters address the core questions that underpin each part. In our final section, we review the wider policy and research implications of the book setting out key future priorities.

This chapter explores the notion of experimentation in the context of urban sustainability transitions. It focuses on the sustainability transitions field apart from the wider literature on social change and policy theory. Experimentation has also been seen as a response to stagnation in conventional policy approaches and as part of the broader trend of the fragmentation of vested authority that creates spaces for new sources of authority, legitimacy and action by new social actors. In a systematic literature review, it distinguishes different types of experiments and some trends that emerge from this research. The researcher designs the set-up of the experiment and aims to control all relevant aspects of the process as far as possible separated from the complexity of real-world conditions. The distinction with transition-oriented experiments is primarily related to the greater diversity of social actors involved and the broader ambition in learning from the experiment.

This study aims to open the black box of resistance to sustainable energy technologies by analyzing (shifts in) media discourse. To this end, media coverage on biofuels in the Netherlands between 2000 and 2008 is analyzed by means of combining novel quantitative approaches with practitioner interviews. The quantitative analyses reveal the dynamics in the content of media discourse, but also its underlying structure in the form of two axes, each representing opposite socio-cognitive frames: ‘techno-economic vs. social–ecological’ and ‘regional vs. global’. In-depth interviews with key practitioners in the Dutch biofuels field support these finding and provide additional insights with regard to (a) perceived shifts in media coverage; (b) cognitive pluralism; (c) the politics involved; and (d) resistance in practice. Keywords: Biofuels; Resistance; Discourse analysis

This paper reviews long-term development of biofuels in Sweden and the Netherlands. In particular this paper explores the social dynamics of ‘niche protection’. The Swedish and Dutch cases are analyzed by means of the Strategic Niche Management (SNM) perspective extended with insights from political science. Our main argument is that the development of biofuels and the way this development is protected relies on a variety of actor strategies and (local and global) discourses. This case therefore suggests that policy making for biofuels is a complex and non-linear process that can only partly be managed by policy actors.