15th MAR: IFI Seminar Series on Sustainability Transitions (Speaker: Dr. Bruno Turnheim)

Sustainability transitions research has received increasing attention in recent years, both in academia and policy making. The long-standing unsustainable patterns of production and consumption in energy, mobility, and other socio-technical systems have brought us enormous social challenges and problems, such as climate change. Such challenges are difficult to be dealt with through incremental innovation or innovation in respective technology. Instead, radical innovation involving fundamental transformation in the socio-technical systems—sustainability transitions, i.e. shifts to new socio-technical systems—and to understand how to govern and guide such a process is urgently needed.
Japan is confronting the challenges of moving toward carbon neutrality by 2050 and accelerating such a sustainable energy transition. In this online seminar series, we thus invite researchers from Europe which has led the sustainability transitions research, to share their insights in energy transition and to exchange ideas.

Dr. Bruno Turnheim,
French National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and Environment (INRAE), Interdisciplinary Laboratory for Science, Innovation and Society (LISIS), Gustave Eiffel University (UGE), France
Manchester Institute of Innovation Research (MIoIR), University of Manchester

“Destabilisation as transition process: Retrospective, prospective and prescriptive accounts”

The destabilisation and decline of established systems is emerging as an important topic within transitions studies and sustainability debates more broadly. While most transitions involve the decline, resistance or deep transformation of established systems, this negatively-connoted process has attracted considerably less attention than its positive counterpart, novelty creation and innovation. This bias can be found in research and policy alike. This talk will provide an overview of relevant entry points and approaches to destabilisation in transitions studies. Building on a distinction between retrospective accounts (e.g. longitudinal case studies), prospective accounts (e.g. modeling and scenarios) and prescriptive accounts (e.g. phase-out as object of governance), it will discuss the scope for bridging between approaches and related challenges.

Secretariat, Institute for Future Initiatives, The University of Tokyo
e-mail: ifi_tg★ifi.u-tokyo.ac.jp (Please replace ★ with @.)