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Against the backdrop of the increasing calls for scholars, universities and the broader academic system to become more societally relevant and contribute to tackling various sustainability challenges, researchers across all disciplines are themselves moving toward conducting more transformative research. Work to date has focused on challenges in these transitions, obstacles to transformative research, and researchers' resistance to ‘impact strategies’; however, little is known about how those who actually do transformative research ultimately overcome these challenges. Using Lewin's field theory as a theoretical basis, we collected qualitative data and carried out 32 in-depth interviews with ‘transformative’ scholars and policy and support staff at Erasmus University Rotterdam (EUR) on the driving and conflicting forces related to transformative research, as well as strategies for dealing with them. An in-depth grounded analysis revealed transformative researchers' identity and goal conflicts and showed how they skillfully navigate those conflicts by choosing between two ideal-typical strategies, ‘transforming through research output’ and ‘transforming through research process’. The constellations of forces identified that actually influence researchers' choices on those strategies need to be taken into account in the designing of effective research policies for leveraging the potential of transformative research to tackle sustainability challenges.

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.

While the Earth system is in overshoot mode with an imminent threat to our social, ecological, and economic systems, cultural evolutionary theory may hold the key to more successfully addressing many of our sustainability challenges. With the aim of illuminating the potential of studying the evolution of a sustainable bioeconomy through a cultural evolutionary lens, this article outlines the contours of a novel research avenue in the form of five propositions. It contributes to current conversations in the literature at the intersection of sustainability transitions, dedicated or mission-oriented innovation systems, and the bioeconomy by raising awareness of the warranted value that a cultural evolutionary perspective has in tackling these grand challenges and addressing how this yet unclaimed potential could be materialized.JEL Codes: B59, E14, E71, H12, O13, O35, Q01, Q50, Z13

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.

This article analyses four of the most prominent city discourses and introduces the lens of urban vitalism as an overarching interdisciplinary concept of cities as places of transformation and change. We demonstrate the value of using urban vitalism as a lens to conceptualize and critically discuss different notions on smart, inclusive, resilient and sustainable just cities. Urban vitalism offers a process-based lens which enables us to understand cities as places of transformation and change, with people and other living beings at its core. The aim of the article is to explore how the lens of vitalism can help us understand and connect ongoing interdisciplinary academic debates about urban development and vice versa, and how these ongoing debates inform our understanding of urban vitalism.

Academic research and policy have focused on sustainable energy transitions for addressing the societal challenge of climate change for a long time, but the concept of ‘social innovation’ has only been recently taken up. This concept refers to different social phenomena relating to changes in socio-technical systems. Moving beyond narrow perspectives on social innovation, this article asks how we can capture the diversity of social innovation, taking the example of the energy sector. It proposes a comprehensive typology of social innovation that allows to capture the phenomenon in its empirical diversity, and to more systematically investigate processes of social innovation and their contributions to making socio-technical systems more sustainable. The typology is based on a conceptual understanding of social innovation in energy (SIE) as comprising changing social relations involving new ways of doing, thinking and/or organising energy. It is empirically grounded in mapping and analysing 500 SIE-initiatives across eight European countries. Such a conceptually-informed and empirically-grounded understanding of SIE sheds light on the ‘social’ as an object of innovation, the agency of a multitude of actors, and the different types of social relations and activities pursued by energy system actors. It also opens the possibility to publicly discuss the diverse social innovations and their interdependencies, (un)desirability, as well as transformative potentials in energy transitions.

This article positions collective renewable energy prosumerism as a social movement that engages in energy system transformation. Collective renewable energy prosumer initiatives engage in ‘prefigurative’ work through their discursive framings (ways of thinking), their activities (ways of doing) and their understanding and enactment of social relations (ways of organising). The core of this article is a comparative analysis of the prefigurative work of 13 collective prosumers from 7 European countries (Belgium, Croatia, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Portugal, United Kingdom). The article discusses their contributions to energy system transformation, including renewable energy production, different mechanisms for involving citizens, local value creation, and the degree of desired and actual collaboration and networking within broader prosumer ecosystems. We then discuss these contributions against societal discourses and expectations towards prosumerism, such as energy democracy, energy justice, and environmental sustainability and decarbonisation. This reveals three tensions: 1) a focus on decarbonisation but not on broader environmental problems, 2) the involvement of certain people and not of others, and 3) the building of prosumer eco-systems while ignoring incumbency. Future research avenues are formulated to conclude the article.

Research on sustainability transitions has expanded rapidly in the last ten years, diversi-fied in terms of topics and geographical applications, and deepened with respect to theories and methods. This article provides an extensive review and an updated research agenda for the field, classified into nine main themes: understanding transitions; power, agency and politics; governing transitions; civil society, culture and social movements; businesses and industries; transitions in practice and everyday life; geography of transitions; ethical aspects; and methodologies. The review shows that the scope of sustainability transitions research has broadened and connections to established disciplines have grown stronger. At the same time, we see that the grand challenges related to sustainability remain unsolved, calling for continued efforts and an acceleration of ongoing transitions. Transition studies can play a key role in this regard by creating new perspectives, approaches and understanding and helping to move society in the direction of sustainability., 0, NB multiple (>20) authors, info:eu-repo/semantics/published

Arctic food systems are increasingly challenged by rapid climate change, loss of food security and subsequent weakening of food sovereignty, and destabilization of Indigenous practices. Despite growing scientific knowledge on Arctic food systems, Indigenous communities continue to struggle with a plethora of sustainability challenges. To develop a systemic understanding of these challenges, we performed a systematic review of 526 articles published between 1998 and 2021 on Arctic Indigenous food systems. We used the leverage points framework to structure our analysis to understand to what extent the existing Western scientific body of literature provides the necessary knowledge to understand the food system characteristics that give rise to the current sustainability challenges. We combined deductive qualitative and inductive quantitative approaches to identify gaps in the systemic understanding of Arctic Indigenous food systems. We characterized existing research across the four levels of systemic depth—parameters, feedbacks, design, intent—and identified promising directions for future research. Our analyses show that research on food systems is clustered within six main domains, we term environmental contaminants, diet and health, food security, food culture and economy, changing socio-ecological systems and marine and coast. Based on our analysis, we identify three directions for future research that we believe to be of particular importance to enable sustainability transformations of Arctic Indigenous food systems: (i) the decolonization of research practices, (ii) acknowledging the significance of systemic interdependencies across shallow and deep leverage points, and (iii) transdisciplinary action-oriented research collaborations directing transformative system interventions.

While literature on sustainability transitions has generally portrayed incumbent firms as reluctant to engage in sustainable niches and primarily employing strategies that aim to limit niche growth, practice offers many examples that contradict this. In this paper, we mobilize insights from organizational literature, and particularly the concept of entry modes and entry timing from the international business and strategy literature, to investigate incumbent firms’ engagement in sustainable niches through the introduction of new products, collaborative efforts with new entrants, the introduction of new brands, mergers & acquisitions, and investments. We focus on entry modes of incumbent firms, including food firms, meat processors, retailers, and food service firms, in meat substitute markets in the United States (US), the Netherlands (NL), and the United Kingdom (UK). We identify distinct entry mode patterns for the four firm types and that the entry modes of different types of incumbent firms vary in their timing and commitment towards the plant-based meat substitute niche. Contrary to the general consensus stemming from previous literature on incumbent engagement in transitions, our case shows that incumbents proactively engaged with niche products incentivized by economic opportunities stemming from changing consumption patterns, which preceded any regulatory action.

In the currently emerging paradigm of challenge-led and transformative innovation policies, there is increasing attention for addressing urgent societal problems by formulating clear, timebound and ambitious mission goals. Completing such transformative mission's places new demands on innovation systems, as actors and activities need to align around prioritised problem and solution directions. Consequently, new perspectives that support the appraisal of innovation systems’ performance are required for determining what hampers change processes, and which policy responses are appropriate. Following an abductive research approach, this paper aims to develop an analytical framework for assessing mission-specific innovation systems (MIS). We examine three sectoral cases in the mission for a Circular Economy in the Netherlands and propose three analytical steps: 1) a problem-solution analysis, 2) a structural analysis recognising the importance of mission arenas, and 3) a functional analysis addressing directionality provision, coordination, and regime transformation. We conclude with discussing operationalisation and application of the framework.