4.1 Key drivers of the transition

Human systems would not exist without people, conscious agents that create and maintain, but also change, the systems that exist. What kind of actors and forms of action are needed to build pathways to planetary well-being? Can a sustainability transition ever be achieved if everyone is not willing to follow the same path, or if someone actively creates obstacles along the way? What is the responsibility of individuals in the transition? Some answers to these questions can be found by taking a look at the different actors and agencies in the sustainability transition.

The people involved in different production and consumption systems can be classified according to the group from which they participate in the system. For example, policy makers, public officials, workers who make their living by working for the system, businesses, researchers and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are examples of groups of actors, each of whom has a different perspective on the same system and participates in its processes.

 

4.1.1 Public sector

One of the key elements of the sustainability transition is the public sector (municipalities, states and their unions) and, above all, the set of policy instruments and their control, i.e. public administration. Public administration can contribute to the sustainability transition in a number of ways, the most important of which can be grouped under the following headings:

• Promoting sustainability transition through both hard and soft instruments, ranging from laws and regulations to contracts, financial incentives and communication.
• Seeking to manage the processes of transition and their consequences, for example by ensuring that low-income earners are able to have their needs met and pursue their well-being even if energy, food and transport prices rise.
• Altering the way of governance, for example decision-making processes.

In most societies, the public sector has a unique administrative authority: only the public sector can legislate for all members of society and direct the flow of money through taxation and redistribution (sometimes the right to tax is also given to the church). Because of these special abilities, the public sector has a special role to play, both as a contributor to and a resolver to the current crises. The public sector must therefore change radically as many of its current structures and processes allow, maintain and even encourage unsustainable practices.

Paradigms that need to be dismantled

The biggest demands for change concern the entire economic system, which is seen as an enabler of unsustainability but whose very existence ultimately depends on the choices made by public institutions. The market is always an institution created and regulated by the public sector, which creates and maintains the basic rules of the market. The amount of regulation may vary, but the limits of regulation are also decided by the public sector. The value of money is ultimately an imaginary and entirely socially constructed belief, maintained by institutions, and states and their central banks can change the value of money through political decisions (Similarly, if we all forgot overnight what things like "money" and "price" meant, money would virtually cease to exist).

The public sector determines the limits of market freedom and action. Views differ on whether the sustainability transition also requires a reduction in commercialization and globalization. The sociological conceptual framework of ecological modernization argues that major systems changes in production and consumption are necessary but achievable through technological advances – by adopting cleaner and more efficient technologies. The capitalist economy may not be seen as necessary for the sustainability transitin, but neither is it seen as an obstacle to it; the market can also provide opportunities to regulate and mitigate environmental damage in an optimal way, for example through emissions trading. Critical perspectives, on the other hand, emphasize the interconnectedness between the current market economy and the economic growth dependency of societies. Studies on the links between economic growth and ecological damage have so far failed to find a successful example of decoupling anywhere in the world, even at the level of state finances. An alternative paradigm for growth dependency is the degrowth economy.

 

Photo by Rafael Matsunaga, CC BY 2.0. 

The scientific basis for the concept of degrowth has been built by ecological economists. It has also been much discussed in feminist studies, for example, and in post-colonial studies, examining the colonial legacy of structures and culture critically, that have criticized growth dependency and the paradigmatic role of growth as a goal or condition of development as an expression of colonialism.

Assuming growth as the starting point for desirable developments is also common in sustainability policy work. For example, a 2022 study of recent EU bioeconomy visions found that the vision, which also took planetary boundaries into account, followed a colonialist mindset and ignored inequality, overconsumption and extractivism (a model of an economy based on overconsumption of natural resources and export of raw materials). According to the researchers, the vision therefore does not promote deep changes in systems. An important skill is therefore to learn to look at the possible futures and systems upheavals that different sustainability strategies and visions enable and promote, on the one hand, and exclude, on the other.

Other radical demands for change in public sector systems concern the basic values of the system and our understanding of the definition and role of society in general. Global responsibility requires a dismantling of the nation-state mentality that equates the functions of society with the self-interest of the nation. According to social scientist Nancy Fraser, for example, questions of justice should always be considered beyond the boundaries of the nation state, since the majority of decisions has an impact beyond the borders of the state, whether environmental or economic.

  

4.1.2 The private sector

Private markets account for the vast majority of production and consumption in many of today's high-income countries. According to a report by the Climate Accountability Institute (whose original calculation is based on a peer-reviewed publication), the world's 20 largest non-state-owned companies accounted for as much as 35% of global GHG emissions from production and consumption between 1965 and 2018. The actions of the largest companies are therefore very crucial, at least for the sustainability transition required by the climate crisis. A closer look shows that these 20 companies are energy companies producing fossil fuels (in other sectors, the major cement companies are closest to the top). Therefore, energy transition (which we learned about in section 3.4) is one of the key challenges of the sustainability transition. On the other hand, almost all human activities use energy – it is needed for practically everything from heating homes and producing food to moving around and producing, maintaining and repairing goods, as well as for many activities that mitigate environmental damage. Thus, energy cannot be seen as an issue separate from other activities. The above calculation also ignores emissions from land use, which is a huge source of emissions from food production, accounting for almost a quarter of all anthropogenic GHG emissions (UNFCCC Introduction to Land Use). Thus, the emissions from agricultural enterprises remain largely hidden if the calculation method above is used.

The relationship between the private sector and the rest of society is a fluctuating one. When it comes to fluctuation, commercialization and marketisation, and the globalization of markets, have long been main features (at least in industrialized countries). This trend is linked to neoliberalism, which argues that a combination of free markets and a state providing certain basic services (such as justice, policing and basic education) is the best way to promote the prosperity and thus the well-being of nations. Commercialization refers to the phenomenon in which activities that were previously outside the market become subjects of monetary transaction. For example, childcare, care services, many domestic tasks (such as cooking), the maintenance of commodities, the promotion of physical activity and education are increasingly commercialized activities (although a small, wealthy elite as already paid for labor for such things as housekeeping for a long time). The public sector has outsourced many of the services it used to provide itself, which is a form of commercialization.

In the globalization of markets, the materials and raw materials for various products, or the human labor involved in their manufacture, are partly or entirely sourced from other parts of the world. In other words, the value chains of products, i.e. the life cycle process from their initial stages to their use (and disposal) by the consumer, are globalized. For example, in 2022, technology giant Apple announced that it sources parts, materials and assembly services for its products from at least 31 countries on five continents. Raw materials for various parts are likely to come from an even wider range, although the company does not publish precise details of them. The design, manufacturing and assembly of components is also often decentralized to several countries. For example, according to a 2018 report by news agency CNBC, in 2018 Apple's A12 system-on-chips for phones and other devices were designed in the US but manufactured in Taiwan. The chips may have been packaged and tested in the Philippines and assembled into final products in China or Taiwan. In 2020, Apple was known to source materials for its mobile phones from at least 43 countries on six continents (for example, the cameras were made in Japan and the accelerometer system that allows a phone to be used for navigation was made in Germany). Fairphone, the Dutch electronics manufacturer, on the other hand, has reported in its 2019 subcontractor report that a total of 76 subcontractors listed by the company are supplying components for the phone model it was making at the time, some making simple components and others more complex ones. Various component materials such as gold, tungsten and tantalum could have, in turn, come from a total of 228 smelters, each sourcing minerals from a number of different mines.

4.1.3 Communities and civil society

Civil society is a set of diverse communities: it is a field of operation in which people and groups of people voluntarily come together around common goals or interests. It consists of formal and informal communities of people – for example associations or groups of activists formed to promote a cause – and of networks between them. A mountain biking group, a religious group and a community of sustainability researchers such as JYU.Wisdom at the University of Jyväskylä are all different kind of communities. Almost every person belongs to many communities. Communities are of particular interest in the context of the sustainability transition, especially when considering the sustainability transition as a change in practices, the role of the third sector in decision-making related to sustainability transition, or the capacities and responsibilities of promoting the sustainability challenge.

The Critical Mass "bike marches" called for better transport infrastructure to support cycling in hundreds of cities around the world in the 1990s and 2000s. Photo: Varsha.shakya, GFDL.

Practices determine the shapes that everyday activities take. A practice describes a repeated way of doing that has become habitual or customary, and is explained by a set of different images, meanings, materials and skills. In essence, the sustainability transition is a transition of the very practices that prevail, and it is therefore important to pay attention to practices and to how and why certain ways of doing things have become the norm. Research on planetary well-being has also emphasized that, from a sustainability perspective, the key issue is the ways – in other words, the practices – in which human needs are met.

Action on the civil society level also has a significant role in building and strengthening the capacities and competences both for the sustainability transition itself and for enhancing its justness. Achieving a sustainability transition in communities requires that their members – or at least a significant proportion of their members – have new understanding and skills to support sustainability. Take the example of reducing meat consumption for climate reasons. Change is much easier for people who know what to eat instead of meat to maintain satiation, energy levels and health, and have the skills and time to cook plant-based meals, or alternatively the money and skills to use services rather than cooking themselves, for example by eating more restaurant food, takeaway or convenience food.

At EU level, the GreenComp sustainability competence framework, created by researchers and education experts, lists the knowledge, skills and ethical competences that are essential for promoting sustainable transition and acting more sustainably. The Planetary well-being course series also aims to strengthen such skills. In a civil society, the emphasis is on the opportunity for individuals to learn these skills in a way that is tailored to their own values, interests and situations in life. Recent theoretical research on the division of responsibilities in relation to climate change has also argued for a focus on the roles that people can play in relation to the sustainability transition. Of course, these roles extend beyond civil society, i.e. we have different roles in both the public and the market arena.

4.1.4 Roles, agency and access to different leverage points

 The tripartite division between the public sector, the private sector and civil society described above is a classic and significant way of conceptualizing the actors involved in the functioning of society and in the maintenance and reform of its rules. However, all the systems described above are based on human action, and it is worth looking at actors in more detail than the general tripartite division allows.

Different actors can take very different positions in relation to the efforts and struggles to change the system. They may demand or promote change, or on the other hand, they may obstruct or resist change – or remain silent and indifferent, which in practice means tacitly siding with the majority. Since sustainability transition is a massive reform or replacement of unsustainable systems with better systems, of particular interest is how different actors can influence systems change. Already in the previous course on planetary prosperity, roles were discussed, and in the following we will go deeper into their examination in relation to the sustainability transition. The most important lesson on roles is this: systems change can be driven from a variety of roles, and change is by no means only in the hands of those with the most political power or financial wealth.

The actors' starting positions are linked to the levels of the system that we learned about in the MLP framework earlier in this course. For example, in the struggles over the global fossil fuel economy, multinational energy companies and, for example, the major oil-producing countries are key players in the regime, who have also defended the regime against the pressures for change that call for a shift away from fossil fuels. Pressures, in turn, stem from the wider landscape in which the system operates. First, these pressures for change were generated mainly by scientists and environmental organizations in, until eventually the climate issue became a more widely recognized concern.

The year 1990 can be seen as a milestone of change. It was the year of the world's second World Climate Conference, the publication of the first report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the decision of the UN General Assembly to start preparing for climate negotiations, which led to the UNFCCC Framework Convention on Climate Change in 1992.

In recent decades, the regime has begun to be challenged and changed from the other direction by niche activities, namely the development of fossil-free energy solutions. In terms of technological innovation, key groups of actors driving change and challenging the regime have included research communities and businesses, which have also often developed new solutions together, but also local communities, which have started to develop household- and community-level solutions for energy production, thus reducing their dependence on fossil energy and energy companies.

As the example above illustrates, transitional efforts bring together actors from all three sectors of society: public sector, private sector and civil society. Actors can operate at one or more scales, from local and regional to national, international and global.

To get a better understanding of the different agencies in the arenas where transitions and associated struggles are taking place, we turn our attention from general groups of actors to the roles of different actors. Roles are identifiable positions within the structures of systems. Often a single actor has many roles in different sections of life. Even within the same day, a role can vary: for example, many of us first play the role of family member in the morning, then that of worker or student in a community, and in the evening roles related to our own hobbies or self-development (for example, as bass player in an orchestra, subsistence farmer or manager of a local football club). Additionally, we all have the basic roles of consumer and citizen. As consumers, we buy and consume goods and services, and as citizens, we play our role by voting and participating in political debate, for example.

Collective actors can also have many roles, although rarely as many as individuals. For example, a company is a seller and a buyer, sometimes a contract negotiator and sometimes a provider of knowledge or solutions, or a co-creator in research or development projects. The activities of associations are often focused on a specific purpose, but the core activities of a football club, for example, include roles ranging from enabling adult sporting activities (management and maintenance of pitches and coordination of shifts) to promoting recreational and educational activities for children and young people (training groups led by professional instructors) and organizing events (football tournaments). Football clubs also often interact with other clubs and, individually or jointly, play a role in lobbying for equal opportunities, for example. They may also work together to find solutions to getting people take public transportation, carpool, or bike to football practice more often, or to make indoor football facilities carbon neutral.

In socio-technical research, particular attention has also been paid to the important role of so-called intermediaries in the context of transition. Intermediaries can be individuals, organizations or networks. They are a range of actors who bring together knowledge, needs, resources and actors, for example to create new links between producers and consumers (so that new innovations can succeed). They bring together funders and actors and inform decision-makers about the changes needed to mainstream more sustainable solutions. They can also provide a range of information, project and consultancy services to help niche actors, for example, to seek cooperation with actors in the regime. The main “types” of intermediaries are:

• Systemic intermediaries, whose role is to promote and pioneer or support the goal of system-wide transition (e.g. SITRA, the Dutch “Innovation Network Rural Areas and Agricultural Systems” and many innovation centers).
• Regime level intermediaries, whose role is created by the current system but which have a mandate to promote sustainability transition and which often also work at the system-wide level as well as with niche actors (e.g. various regional development organizations and funding distributors)
• Niche-level intermediaries whose role is to feed and promote different types of innovation (e.g. consortia promoting renewable energy production by local communities)
• Process intermediaries that aim to promote a specific project or niche process in a way that supports the objectives of other actors by coordinating an overall process (e.g. sustainability consultants and project managers)
• User intermediaries that facilitate the spreading of new technologies to users and, on the other hand, the transmission of users' needs and wishes to product developers and actors in the regime to enable the spreading of innovations (e.g. internet forums that discuss new sustainable technology solutions; advocacy groups; informal alliances such as the early stages of car-sharing groups).

As roles are positions in human systems, they are often associated with certain expectations or culturally shared values. These form a shared understanding of how to perform a role well; for example, what a good teacher, priest or mother does or does not do. These ideals guide many perceptions of the responsibilities and activities associated with the role. At the same time, they function both as constraints on action ("a good priest does not drink alcohol") and as demands for a particular kind of action ("a good teacher does everything possible to ensure that every student in the class learns to speak English"). Roles also enable many actions by giving access to different cultural, social or material resources. For example, those working in city and state posts have access to vast amounts of information about different city- and state-level systems and the workings and actors in their processes. Teachers, on the other hand, have access to a position where they can, often through long-term collaboration, work to support whole groups of students in strengthening knowledge, thinking skills and sustainability competences.

Indeed, different people, depending on their roles, have very different opportunities to influence systems change. It is important to bear in mind, for example, that for almost all people, these roles and the opportunities they offer go far beyond the consumership often emphasized in public discussion. Thinking of individuals primarily as consumers is common but problematic, as it reproduces the assumption of the primary of the market as a determinant of people's actions and opportunities and underplays the range of agency at the individual level.

Role ideals change as the cultures and values of communities change. An everyday example of this is the changing perceptions of domestic chores and the division of parental responsibilities. Similarly, for example, not only do notions of what makes a good teacher and a good customer service person vary from culture to culture, but they are also very much vary over time. Expectations for businesses, on the other hand, have been shaped, in part, by the sustainability transition-related pressures for change in the business environment, as reflected in corporate sustainability reporting. The content of the reports and their perception of the role of businesses in the sustainability transition reflect general trends in environmental policy and debate: climate change is much more widely recognized than biodiversity loss. In 2020, only less than a quarter of large companies assessed the risks that biodiversity loss could pose to their business, while climate emission reduction targets were found in 65% of the reports, and just over half of large companies set themselves targets related to Agenda 2030.

Systems transitions are often (though not always) long-term processes, in which even the most central players can play multiple roles. For example, large companies that have established themselves as part of the regime may take on a dual role, playing an active role both in preserving the regime and in developing new innovations. The development of new innovations can either be a genuine attempt by the company to change the direction of its activities through a transitional phase, or simply a strategic effort to expand the market through side business, which may also help to create a more responsible corporate image (even if the main production activity remains the same). Examples of dual roles can be found in all major production and consumption sectors: in energy systems, St1 is investing in renewable energy while still continuing to operate in the oil sector; in transport systems, many vehicle manufacturers have also chosen to develop electric cars; and in food systems, the largest operator in the meat sector in 2022, Cargill, with a turnover of over USD 165 billion, entered the plant protein business in the early 2020s with the launch of its own plant-based steaks and “minced meat”.

Agency and power

Power and power relations exist wherever people interact with other people. Power is therefore an important but also contested concept in systems research. Power enables action. Transition agency implies the power to act differently, and power or lack of power relates to the actor's ability to promote their own goals. Because different actors have very different goals – some have the goal to preserve the dominant system and their own interests, others to make the whole world a more just place, conducive to planetary well-being – the pressure of systems transition always produces tense struggles in which power relations matter. In the context of sustainability transition, power can therefore accelerate, slow down or even prevent change.

Power is intrinsically linked to resources and the ability to harness or mobilize different resources. Power takes different forms in different contexts: it can be ideological, physical, military, political or economic.

Classification of power able to mobilize resources. Based on Avelino (2017) and Avelino & Rotmans (2009).

From a sustainability transition perspective, it is particularly relevant to think about power in relation to the mechanisms that enable and inhibit permanence and change. Not all power is the same in this respect, but a certain kind of power enables certain kinds of things, not just any kind of things. We can therefore distinguish consolidating, innovative and transformative power. The important lesson of the distinction is that promoting change does not require belonging to the group of actors who have accumulated the most power for themselves, but that power can also be challenged or produced from other positions.

Consolidating power is the ability to consolidate and sustain existing structures and systems. From the MLP perspective, consolidating power can be understood as power exercised jointly by actors in the regime. For example, much of today's work reproduces an unsustainable system, and small actors such as family businesses may also engage in the exercise of consolidating power, even if their purposes may simply be related to their own subsistence (the section on structural inequality in the Good life and planetary well-being course also addresses this subject). Indeed, in the context of the sustainability transition, talk of power often refers exclusively to consolidating power: how the distribution of power prevents the changes required to take ambitious climate action or to halt the biodiversity loss. This refers, for example, to the fact that those with the most money made from unsustainable activities have the most money to lobby decision-makers and promote the pseudo-greenness of their own activities or the benefits of their own sector's activities to society, with the result that public opinion is not in favor of regulating the sector. However, consolidating power is only one form of power; innovative power and transformative power, on the other hand, promote change.

Innovative power is the ability to innovate – to produce new resources and solutions. It is typical of niche players. For example, the ability to make electric cars, inventing a new type of small wind turbine, starting a subsistence farm, and the skill to make a plant protein roast for Christmas dinner that everyone finds delicious are examples of innovative power. Such innovation can also be empowering in itself, if it helps to reduce dependence on resources currently controlled by the big players of the regime (e.g. the oil industry) who have accumulated power for themselves. In agriculture, for example, open access to certain varieties has, to some extent, restored power to local producers. Power has been concentrated in the hands of global seed companies, which (with patent rights) have banned farmers from harvesting the following year's seeds from the previous summer's crop and instead required farmers to buy new seeds from the company each year. This has made farmers very vulnerable to the pricing policies and contract terms of seed companies. New innovations can therefore, in themselves, create cracks in the current power system.

Innovative power can also focus on non-material innovations, such as new ways of structuring the world through different concepts, frameworks and stories. In this case, innovative power is directed at ideological power. Of course, this is not simply a matter of bringing a new product to market – a vegan Christmas roast on a store shelf does not, in itself, necessarily reduce demand for animal products, but only increases the demand for and consumption of Christmas food.

Transformative power is the ability to create new structures and institutions or processes that are central to their operation. For example, power associated with legislative reform, the infrastructure of society, or changing the objectives of the economic system is transformative power. Such power allows for deeper changes in systems. Often the most transformative power would be in the hands of actors who also have consolidating power, but it is more fruitful to think of renewal and consolidation as different forms of power. Transformative power emerges especially in moments when the regime has started to crack and/or a particular niche solution has strengthened its popularity to such an extent that the time is right for redefining the solutions, rules, and values of the regime.

In systems transitions, different forms and levels of power overlap and intersect in many different ways, so that it would too simplistic to speak of change as only one form of power, or as a form power that only leads in one direction. A good example of this is the rise of electric cars, which has begun to transform motoring and decouple it from fossil fuels on a large scale around the world. While this change is enabling the transport system’s transition away from dependence on fossil fuels (one feature of the dominant transport system), it is also reinforcing the transport system's reliance on private motoring (another feature of the dominant transport system). Partly for this reason, the popularity of electric vehicles has, after a certain point, risen relatively rapidly, as the solution has allowed the major players in the automobile industry to maintain their position and the power that comes with it, as long as they snatch the new engine technology solution developed in the niche – which does not require them to revolutionize their entire operations (unlike, say, an oil company becoming a wind power company) – and make it their own.

The electric car is also an example of a moderately reformative use of innovative power. A radical use of power, in turn, would aim to fundamentally disrupt the whole system, down to its operative logic and objectives. The radical use of power thus seeks to influence the strongest leverage points of Donella Meadows' theory of leverage points: the objectives of systems, the mindsets of

communities and the flexibility (readiness for change) of mindsets. For example, movements that challenge the entire economic system or globalization represent attempts at a radical way of exercising power. Some niches represent radical innovations, whose activities are described and motivated by such aspirations. For example, grassroots movements for self-sufficiency and some alternative food networks aim to break away from the dominant systems of production and consumption and to demonstrate that alternative systems are possible.

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