The management of the co-evolution of technical, environmental and social systems

Abstract

Environmental problems of pollution have been countered quite successfully through the use of control technology and cleaner processes at the production side. At the consumer side little has changed. People still engage in the individual use of motorised transport and energy-intensive life styles. The common explanation for this is that people want automobility, cheap energy and cheap food. Such an explanation assumes that people preferences are fixed and that the system is geared toward satisfying these. It fails to see that people want many things; that consumer choices are restricted by supply choices, and that user benefits may conflict with societal benefits. Supply and demand not only interact but also interlock. Their interaction gives rise to particular trajectories, which are sustained by industrial interests vested in it, assumptions about user needs and high costs of making a system change, both for the actors concerned and society of large. The above helps to understand why most change is incremental, aimed at exploitation rather than exploration (March 1991). Environmental policy has been unsuccessful in changing behaviour and bringing about societal transformations, involving a change in both technology and behaviour. There is a consensus that the existing trajectories in transport, energy, and agriculture are not sustainable, but the alternatives are not clear or deemed unsatisfactory by experts. There is a conflict between short-term goals of policy and the long-term change needed for sustainability. Whilst the goal of sustainable development has been accepted there is a paucity of concepts and tools to work towards it. This paper offers an approach to further sustainability goals. We have called this approach transition management because it aims at managing the processes of co-evolution that make up a transition. Transition management consists of the management of phases of a transition in a reflexive, iterative and stepwise manner. Dutch policy makers in the new national environmental policy plan Een wereld en een wil (A world and a willing) have embraced it and made it official policy. The plan uses 2030 as a time horizon. In this paper we explain the notion of transition management and explain why it is a useful model for managing processes of coevolution and transitions. © Springer Berlin Heidelberg 2005.