The Incongruities of Sustainable Sociotechnical Transitions
Maurie J. CohenGraduate Program in Environmental Policy
StudiesNew Jersey Institute of Technology
University HeightsNewark, NJ 07102
Email: [email protected]
Landscape
Trajectory
Niche
Regime
Macro
Meso
Micro
Transition Management—A Multilevel Perspective
Landscape
Trajectory
Niche
Landscape
Macro-scale, external conditions characterized by slowly changing features (e.g., culture, social values,
geopolitics).
Regime
Landscape
Trajectory
Niche
Niche
Protected areas where non-mainstream values can co-exist with conventional practices.
Regime
Landscape
Trajectory
Niche
Trajectory/Regime
Meso-scale includes technologies, user practices, social networks, regulations, infrastructure, and
technoscientific knowledge.
Regime
“Advocates of sustainable transition management do not always appreciate the deep ambivalence of sustainability as a category and its power as legitimizing discourse…Arguably equally important and largely neglected in the management literature are those transitions which appear to be heading in exactly the opposite direction, which emerge from left field “managed” by actors whose interest are not part of the consensus vision and whose “malignant” priorities lie elsewhere…How should those concerned with sustainability respond to the increasingly rapid, powerful, and expertly orchestrated diffusion of unsustainable technologies, practices, and images?”
Elizabeth Shove and Gordon Walker, Environment and Planning A (2007)
“[I]n the context of sustainable development…[g]oals are vague, ambivalent, or conflicted. We are plagued by uncertainties and ignorance, and power is distributed among many actors and across many subsystems. In other words, we are not sure, or we cannot agree, exactly, where we want to go. We do not fully understand complex, evolving, and interlinked natural and social systems, and power is so broadly dispersed that policy-makers lack the ability to make things happen.”
James Meadowcroft, Environment and Planning A (2007)
Daedalus and Icarus
Leonardo DaVinci’s Conceptions of Air Flight
Charles Ritchel’s Flying Machine (1878) Norman Bel Geddes' Flying Car (1945)
Contemporary Concepts of Autonomous Air Flight
NASA aims to improve the mobility of U.S. citizens by reducing travel time for both short and long journeys. This requires a wide range of innovations and improvements. For example, NASA is working on methods to integrate small aircraft and public use landing facilities into the National Air Transportation System to significantly reduce travel time into and out of every community.
—NASA, Strategic Plan, 2000
Photo courtesy NASAArtist concept of SATS aircraft
Small Aircraft Transportation System
One vision of the future from 1932.
Solar Impulse, Bertrand Piccard’s solar powered airplane