Remaking political institutions in sustainability transitions: Celebrating a decade of EIST: What’s next for transition studies?

Abstract

A key challenge for sustainability transitions scholarship in the coming decade is to understand how existing political institutions (e.g. policies, laws, regulations, constitutions) can be remade to support transitions. This requires not only explaining past changes, but also ‘thinking forward’ about the types of struggles likely to occur when institutional changes are deliberately pursued. Several areas of struggle come into view: the politics of novelty, uptake, dismantling, stability, and interplay across regimes. This leads to a view of institutional transformation as an unfolding trajectory ‘in-the-making’, characterized by emergent path creation. Moreover, it enables new bridges from transitions thinking to broader political and policy sciences which also increasingly puzzle over how major societal change may be realized in contemporary society.