Making sense of sustainability transitions locally: how action research contributes to addressing societal challenges

Abstract

Today’s society is facing a broad array of societal challenges, such as an unstable economic system, climate change and lasting poverty. There are no straightforward solutions, rather these challenges ask for fundamental societal changes, that is, sustainability transitions. Faced with the question of how these challenges can be understood and dealt with, we argue for action research as a promising approach. Focusing on their localized manifestations, we ask whether and how action research can support understanding and addressing societal challenges and making sustainability meaningful locally. We tackle this question on the basis of two case studies in local communities based on principles of transition management. Our main finding is that societal challenges, sustainability and sustainability transitions acquire meaning through practice and interactions in the local context. Action research can offer a space in which alternative ideas (e.g., knowledge, future visions), practices (e.g., practical experiments, transformative action) and social relations (e.g., new actors) can emerge to further a sustainability transition.

Keywords:

• action research
• sustainability transition
• societal challenges
• sustainability
• transition management

Acknowledgments

This article is based on research carried out as part of the project ‘InContext – Supportive environments for sustainable living’ which was funded by the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7) under grant agreement 265191. The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the European Union. We would like to thank Tim O’Riordan, the symposium editor Koen Bartels and the two anonymous reviewers of CPS for their constructive comments on earlier versions of this paper.

Notes

1. We use the concepts of sustainability and sustainable development as synonyms in this article since this is common practice in related scientific discourses. For an in-depth analysis of commonalities and differences between both concepts and terms see, for example, Lélé (1991).

2. The process and outcomes of our action research in both Carnisse and Finkenstein are documented in a number of deliverables of the InContext project (see Wittmayer et al. 2011a, 2011b, 2012, 2013a, 2013b, 2013c).

3. A sociocratic election is an intermediate form between consensus and majority vote, allowing all voters to temporarily block decisions in case of strong concerns.

4. For earlier discussions on addressing sustainability in this research practice, see Wittmayer et al. (2013a, 2013c), Schäpke et al. (2013), and Wittmayer and Schäpke (2014).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Julia Maria Wittmayer

Julia Maria Wittmayer is a senior researcher at DRIFT, Erasmus University Rotterdam, where she works mainly on social innovation and social sustainability in urban areas and on a local scale. She is interested in the roles, social relations and interactions of actors involved in transition (management) processes and initiatives.

Niko Schäpke

Niko Schäpke is a PhD candidate at Leuphana University Lüneburg. His research interests include transition management, sustainability transitions, social learning, the capability approach, environmental psychology, and transdisciplinarity.

Frank van Steenbergen

Frank van Steenbergen is a researcher at DRIFT, where he focusses on social and local dynamics within transition studies. Recurrent themes in his research are social inclusion and exclusion, social innovation, urban marginality, local democratic participation and neighborhood development.

Ines Omann

Ines Omann holds a PhD in ecological economics and after 10 years being a senior researcher at the Sustainable Europe Research Institute in Vienna, since May 2014 she is a senior researcher at the Helmholtz Research Center for Environmental Research in Leipzig. Her research areas include sustainability transitions, participatory and transdisciplinary science, scenario development, quality of life and well-being, sustainable lifestyles.