Unravelling the (post-)political in Transition Management: Interrogating Pathways towards Sustainable Change

Abstract

Coming to terms with recent insights concerning the (post-) political is a key challenge for transition management. To start with, transition management understands the relation transition initiatives adopt towards existing regimes not in political, but in market terms. This impacts their internal processes, which are based on a deliberative notion of democracy, assuming the existence of a common good and misrecognizing the constitutive role of conflict. Moreover, transition management embraces a governance approach centring on public–private bodies which, in the name of bottom-up processes and participation, especially gives a voice to a privileged group of business, policy and civil society actors. Insofar as citizens get a place, it is merely in their role as consumers. Finally, as it is based on a market model itself, transition management fails to politicize one of the most fundamental current ‘landscape’ elements. The crucial question is how these features affect transition management's possibilities to contribute to effective and democratic sustainable change.

Key Words:

• Sustainability
• Transition management
• Post-politics
• Democracy
• Deliberation
• Market

Notes

1. More in particular, the authors were involved in and/or closely observed the practices and discourses of the Flemish transition initiative on sustainable material management (Plan C), sustainable agriculture, the atypical transition arena in Flanders composed of civil society actors, and Leuven Carbon Neutral, a city initiative partly inspired by transition management.