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There have been increasing calls in transition research for a global view of sustainability challenges. We argue that this focus should be expanded from a concentration on the Earth's surface and stratosphere to include outer space. The substantial growth of the space sector over the past decade has seen huge increases in the number of rocket launches, the diversity of actors, and the availability of new essential services that depend on space-based infrastructure. In particular, the rise of satellite-based infrastructure could drive the need for inter-related multi-system transitions across a wide range of Earth-bound sectors. These developments, however, cause diverse new sustainability pressures, such as atmospheric pollution, increased energy consumption, and the accumulation of space debris. To address these challenges, this article proposes earth-space sustainability as a new frontier for sustainability transition research, requiring the expansion of conceptual and analytical tools at the interface of transition and global governance research.

In this paper, we use the theory of institutional work to understand how plant-based meat substitutes emerge and successfully diffuse in the context of a dominant meat regime in the United States (US). We observe that institutional factors such as norms, habits, values, and beliefs play a more vital role than previously identified. Therefore, we utilize institutional work theory combined with insights from technological innovation systems to create a holistic understanding of this transition. We study the American plant-based protein industry from 1978 to 2019. We conduct a qualitative event-history analysis based on 2345 events from the Nexis Uni database. We observe that by strategically deploying institutional work strategies aimed at creating, maintaining, and disrupting institutions and innovation system-building strategies, innovation system actors created a favorable environment in which meat alternatives can flourish.

Sensing customer needs capabilities generally help firms to utilize customer feedback. Yet, as research linking micro-economics to industrial dynamics has shown, a strong focus on such feedback may prevent an adequate response to more promising market developments. We analyse this tension for firms providing customized services, whose innovativeness heavily depends on customer input. By drawing upon an NK search model, we simulate various interactive search strategies. Our simulations result in hypotheses concerning the strategies’ relation to innovation-based turnover. We use survey data from 292 firms to substantiate our expectations empirically. Both our simulation and regression results point to a positive influence on turnover of sensing customer needs and of customer feedback. While the interaction effect is positive for non-customizing service providers, it is negative for their customizing counterparts. The latter group may fail to exploit their inventiveness, as they concentrate on tuning new services to the specific needs of existing customers rather than turning them into more widely marketable innovations.

Research on sustainability and transitions is burgeoning. Some of this research is helping to solve humankind’s most pressing problems. However, as this provocation argues, up to 50% of the articles that are now being published in many interdisciplinary sustainability and transitions journals may be categorized as “scholarly bullshit.” These are articles that typically engage with the latest sustainability and transitions buzzword (e.g., circular economy), while contributing little to none to the scholarly body of knowledge on the topic. A typology of “scholarly bullshit” is proposed which includes the following archetypes: boring question scholarship, literature review of literature reviews, recycled research, master thesis madness, and activist rants. Since “scholarly bullshit” articles engage with the latest academic buzzwords, they also tend to accumulate significant citations and are thus welcomed by many journal editors. Citations matter most in the metric-driven logic of the academic system, and this type of scholarship, sadly, is thus unlikely to decrease in the coming years.

The circular economy (CE) is now widely seen as a key concept to drive sustainability transformations. Existing research on circular business models has tentatively indicated that circular entrepreneurship may be able to play a pivotal role in the transition process. However, grassroots activity in CE has not yet received substantive scholarly attention, nor have the founders of circular ventures. This study attempts to start closing this gap by presenting the first empirical analysis of circular founders' motivations and identities. Our work is based on interviews with 57 founders of circular start-ups in Europe and Australia. The analysis reveals distinct characteristics for these entrepreneurs. We find that noneconomic motives are dominant drivers of grassroots circular entrepreneurs while they include a triple bottom line orientation (i.e., economic, social, and environmental value) in principle. Yet, circular start-up founders barely formalize socio-political dimensions in their activities despite being motivated by social altruism. Furthermore, circular founders have an inventive mindset when starting their entrepreneurial journey, possibly driven by their limited market-oriented positioning, limited entrepreneurial experience, and managerial education. However, their scaling ambitions grow significantly over time, as opposed to social and sustainable entrepreneurs. Overall, our findings suggest adding grassroots circular entrepreneurs or circular founders as a distinct group of sustainability entrepreneurs to the scientific discourse on sustainability-motivated entrepreneurship and circular innovation studies.

Markets for plant-based protein products are experiencing unprecedented growth. However, the extent to which the wider diffusion of plant-based protein products is beneficial to human and planetary health is still a contested issue in public discourses. The study of media frames for plant-based protein products can serve as a basis for approaches of technology assessment, which aim to inform actors involved in innovation processes of important aspects of diffusion, including controversy and unexpected risks regarding societal reactions. In this paper, we conduct a frame analysis of three U.K. broadsheet newspapers (the Telegraph, the Guardian, and the Times) between 2010–2020 to explore how media frame plant-based protein products. The results show that overall media coverage for plant-based diets has adopted a positive stance. However, there is variation in how plant-based protein products and particularly meat and dairy substitutes are portrayed. The biggest stumbling block appears to be potentially adverse health implications associated with the consumption of meat and dairy substitutes. We therefore argue that the scope of strategic choices regarding product design should also focus on the development of products more analogous to whole plant-based foods. Moreover, we argue that the long-term resilience of the plant-based protein sector will require strategies that convincingly align with policy goals for food security and broader food system sustainability.

Over the past decade, scholars and practitioners have increasingly paid attention to sustainable business models (SBM). How to upscale SBMs is a key question in transition research, but current research has rarely adopted a firm-level perspective to discuss the scaling strategies that initiators of SBMs can use. Collaboration with other actors is one of these scaling strategies, but its adoption by firms hinges on different factors. Considering the type of initiator of the SBM (newcomer vs. incumbent firm) and the differentiation of the SBM's value proposition (high or low), we propose a framework which distinguishes four ‘scaling-through-collaboration’ strategies that firms can use. We explain each strategy with illustrative examples and discuss the array of potential partners and the incentives to pursue collaboration with them. Our work shows how firms can contribute to sustainability transitions by leveraging collaboration to scale their SBM.

Publisher Copyright: © 2022 The Authors This study explored the correlates of climate anxiety in a diverse range of national contexts. We analysed cross-sectional data gathered in 32 countries (N = 12,246). Our results show that climate anxiety is positively related to rate of exposure to information about climate change impacts, the amount of attention people pay to climate change information, and perceived descriptive norms about emotional responding to climate change. Climate anxiety was also positively linked to pro-environmental behaviours and negatively linked to mental wellbeing. Notably, climate anxiety had a significant inverse association with mental wellbeing in 31 out of 32 countries. In contrast, it had a significant association with pro-environmental behaviour in 24 countries, and with environmental activism in 12 countries. Our findings highlight contextual boundaries to engagement in environmental action as an antidote to climate anxiety, and the broad international significance of considering negative climate-related emotions as a plausible threat to wellbeing.

The transition literature attributes various transition tasks to government to support socio-technical transitions toward overcoming societal challenges. It is, however, difficult for civil servants to execute these transition tasks, because they partly conflict with Public Administration (PA) traditions that provide legitimacy to their work. This dilemma is discussed in neither the transition literature nor the PA literature. In this paper, we ask civil servants about the normative arguments that reflect their role perception within the institutional structures of their ministry, when it comes to executing transition tasks. We see these situated and enacted normative arguments and underlying assumptions as implicit rules determining legitimacy. The arguments civil servants used confirm that transition tasks are currently difficult to execute within the civil service. We found seven institutionalized rules that explain this difficulty and highlight the inadequacy of civil servants to adhere to the PA traditions while trying to execute transition tasks.

Grand societal challenges as a policy target have received increasing attention in regional innovation policy. To date, concrete governance strategies to address such challenges with local solutions are underexplored. We propose a small wins approach as a new governance strategy to deal with wicked societal problems. A small wins strategy focuses on accelerating bottom-up initiatives guided by a shared mission. The aim is to activate propelling mechanisms to support and couple self-organizing change processes. We studied 17 regional initiatives for plastic pollution removal in the Netherlands, which show that i. institutional barriers are the hardest for small wins to overcome and achieve wider impact; ii. bottom-up propelling mechanisms reinforce each other, but are generally too weak to transform existing practices due to limited policy support; and iii. systemic propelling mechanisms are largely absent to achieve robust change processes across scales. We see a key task for regional policy to activate systemic mechanisms that help local solutions upscale. This requires policy to learn about the plurality of change processes ‘on the ground’, and to use multi-level governance arrangements to create coherent policies to scale up bottom-up solutions.