Between transition and transformation: understanding sustainability change through governance, agency, and resilience—a qualitative exploration of complexity in sustainability change discourses

Environment Systems & Decisions, vol. 46

Abstract

Abstract Despite the growing body of research on sustainability transitions and sustainability transformations, conceptual overlaps and distinctions remain contested. This study investigates how leading scholars in these fields understand agency, governance, and resilience in the context of societal change. Drawing on 15 semi-structured interviews with highly cited transition and transformation researchers, we gather conceptual insights and make tacit knowledge and personal scholarly perspectives visible. The findings show that agency centers on actor roles and collaborations, operates through a dynamic interplay between individual initiative, collective mobilization, and structural conditions. Governance ranges from state-led top-down to participatory bottom-up approaches, at times combining both. Resilience highlights systems thinking and crises as potential catalysts. Beyond and within these themes, scholars reflect on the blurred boundaries between sustainability transitions and sustainability transformations, and on tensions between process-oriented inclusivity and outcome-oriented directionality, as well as their own roles of researchers in transitions and transformations. These complexity-informed perspectives can advance sustainability research and practice, for example in noting towards adaptive and context-sensitive operationalization of concepts. By foregrounding the voices of scholars whose work has shaped the discourses, the study shows that transitions and transformations should not be treated as linear pathways toward predefined outcomes, but as processes unfolding under conditions of uncertainty, where governance must balance directionality with openness.

Authors 4

1. Esther Trilken Aachen

   Leuphana University of Lüneburg · Leiden University

   Affiliation as printed

   Leiden University, PO Box 9500, 2300 RA, Leiden, The Netherlands

   Leuphana University Lüneburg, Universitätsallee 1, 21335, Lüneburg, Germany

2. Lea Gathen

   Leuphana University of Lüneburg

   Affiliation as printed

   Research Group Governance, Participation and Sustainability, Faculty of Sustainability and Center for the Study of Democracy, Leuphana University Lüneburg, Universitätsallee 1, 21335, Lüneburg, Germany

3. Anna Salomaa corresponding

   University of Helsinki · Lappeenranta-Lahti University of Technology

   Affiliation as printed

   Department of Environmental Sciences, Faculty of Biological and Environmental Sciences, University of Helsinki, Viikinkaari 1, P.O. Box 65, 00014, Helsinki, Finland

   Department of Social Sciences, LUT School of Engineering Sciences, LUT University, Yliopistonkatu 34, 53850, Lappeenranta, Finland

4. Johanna Glinski

   Leuphana University of Lüneburg

   Affiliation as printed

   Leuphana University Lüneburg, Universitätsallee 1, 21335, Lüneburg, Germany