Frank Willem Geels

Non-technical summary: Addressing environmental problems like climate change urgently requires the acceleration of sustainability transitions. This Intelligence Briefing explains why this is starting to happen for technical innovations like renewable energy technologies and electric vehicles. Drawing on socio-technical transitions theory, it discusses five acceleration mechanisms that reduce cost, improve performance, change actor orientations, mobilise finance, and increase socio-political support. While not denying their potential relevance, the Briefing also shows that these acceleration mechanisms are not (yet) being activated for social innovations and deep lifestyle change. The Briefing, therefore, also criticises wishful thinking tendencies in some sustainability transformation research strands. Technical summary: Sustainability transitions should accelerate to address environmental problems like climate change and biodiversity loss. This Intelligence Briefing aims to explain the empirical phenomenon that rapid transitions are starting to happen with regard to several low-carbon technologies (like solar-PV, wind, and electric vehicles), but not with regard to transformative social innovations or lifestyle changes. It identifies and discusses five reasons that help explain this difference: increasing-returns-to-adoption mechanisms; socio-technical feedbacks between technology, actors, and institutions; financial reorientation; issue linkage to wider political goals; and societal acceptance. It further suggests that technical innovations can act as a flywheel or catalyst for subsequent social innovations. And it makes critical comparisons between the socio-technical transitions literature and some approaches in the transformations literature, finding the former more theoretically developed, empirically validated, and policy relevant than the latter for the topic of acceleration. Social media summary: Low-carbon technologies are starting to accelerate sustainability transitions, while purely social innovations linger.

The ERL Focus Issue on Technology and Global Change brings together 19 research articles, 4 perspectives, and 2 topical reviews on wide-ranging topics including innovation, policy, poverty alleviation, digitalisation, and modelling. Collectively, these 25 new articles help advance understanding of technology and global change, building on work 25 years ago by Arnulf Grübler whose system perspective in turn built on pioneering scholarship in evolutionary and institutional economics. In this editorial essay, we survey the 25 contributions to this Focus Issue and draw out some of the themes and ideas that define the research frontiers in this field.

Meeting the Paris Agreement to limit global warming to “well below 2 °C” requires a radical acceleration of action, as the global economy is decarbonising at least five times too slowly. Tipping points, where low-carbon transitions become self-propelling, could be key to achieving the necessary acceleration. We deem these normatively ‘positive’, because they can limit considerable, inequitable harms from global warming and help achieve sustainability. Some positive tipping points, such as the UK’s elimination of coal power, have already been reached at national and sectoral scales. The challenge now is to credibly identify further potential positive tipping points, and the actions that can bring them forward, whilst avoiding wishful thinking about their existence, or oversimplification of their nature, drivers, and impacts. Hence, we propose a methodology for identifying potential positive tipping points, assessing their proximity, identifying the factors that can influence them, and the actions that can trigger them. Building on relevant research, this ‘identifying positive tipping points’ (IPTiP) methodology aims to establish a common framework that we invite fellow researchers to help refine, and practitioners to apply. To that end, we offer suggestions for further work to improve it and make it more applicable.

While escaping the lock-ins of existing systems is essential for accelerated low-carbon transitions, the paper argues that acceleration also requires creating new lock-ins of emerging niche innovations which need to be stabilised before widespread diffusion. The paper makes three conceptual contributions to the lock-in literature: it distinguishes and assesses three specific debates (on locked-in entities, determinism and agency and unlocking), it mobilises insights from multiple social sciences regarding these debates and it identifies interactions between the debates and integrates relevant insights in the multi-level perspective. The paper confronts and illustrates these contributions with empirical analysis of accelerating low-carbon transitions in electricity and auto-mobility systems in Europe, the USA and China. It finds that low-carbon niche innovations became locked-in to dominant designs before widespread diffusion, that accelerated diffusion involved techno-economic and agentic drivers, and that existing systems were unlocked more by niche innovations and regime destabilisation than by external landscape pressures.

This chapter describes the conceptual backgrounds, current debates, and future research topics with regard to the Multi-Level Perspective, which is one of the central frameworks in sustainability transitions research. It shows how the MLP spans multiple social science dichotomies (e.g., stability-change, agency-structure, behaviour-technology) by combining insights from evolutionary economics, sociology of innovation, and (neo)institutional theory. It describes the MLP’s three analytical levels (radical niche-innovations, incumbent socio-technical systems, exogenous landscape developments) and how these interact through four different phases (experimentation, stabilisation, diffusion, institutionalisation). The conceptual ideas are empirically illustrated with an empirical case study of the German electricity transition (1986-2022). The chapter also describes further thematic developments such as the articulation of four kinds of socio-technical transition pathways (substitution, transformation, reconfiguration, and de-alignment and re-alignment) and the elaboration of various actor roles and agentic processes across different dimensions. The chapter ends by identifying seven current research topics: 1) niche-regime interaction, 2) regime destabilisation, decline, and phase-out, 3) diffusion and acceleration, 4) multi-system interaction, 5) whole system reconfiguration, 6) incumbent reorientation, 7) trade-offs between the speed and depth of change.