What are sustainability transitions?

The field of Sustainability Transitions emerged in the early 2000s to better understand and support the profound societal changes needed to address global sustainability challenges, such as climate change, biodiversity loss and resource scarcity. Sustainability transitions focus on how societies transform the systems that provide essential services, including energy, mobility, food, housing and industry. These transitions are complex, long-term processes involving multiple actors and operating across local, national and global scales.

Such transformations are inherently messy. They involve contestation, competing values and visions, technological challenges, policy choices, power and justice dynamics, geographic differences, unintended consequences and feedback effects. Research on socio-technical systems, within which transitions occur, explores how technologies, institutions, markets, cultures and everyday practices co-evolve over time. We recognize and embrace uncertainty, multiple and diverging pathways, disagreement, experimentation and the trade-offs between stability and change.

While by no means exhaustive, prominent research topics include renewable energy, low-carbon mobility, sustainable food systems, healthcare, the built environment, circular economy strategies, water governance, and social innovations such as energy communities and food cooperatives. Increasingly, researchers also examine questions of justice, democracy, geopolitics, digitalization, and the acceleration or destabilization of socio-technical systems.

Our Research Agenda, published in 2019 in STRN’s official journal, EIST, outlines the key scientific and societal challenges currently shaping the field and highlights priorities for future research.

Visit our Learning Resources page to learn more, explore foundational and contemporary books in the field, and watch a wide range of recorded lectures, webinars and conference sessions.

The Sustainability Transitions Research Network (STRN) is the leading global scientific community dedicated to sustainability transitions research. Our mission is to advance the field of sustainability transitions. Four core goals of the network orient our activities: knowledge, education, exchange and outreach.

Our flagship event, the annual International Sustainability Transitions Conference (IST), brings together more than 500 scholars, policymakers and practitioners from around the world to debate and share cutting-edge research and emerging ideas.

We organize theoretical and methodological trainings for PhD Candidates and early career researchers. These annual, week-long programmes help develop the next generation of transitions scholars, educators and policy professionals.

We foster science-policy engagement through invited lectures, panels and policy debates by policy makers. Many members of our community are actively engaged in science-policy, serving on scientific committees and contributing to high impact policy reports. 

Eleven thematic groups are bottom up initiatives with a specific focus. Our 5000+ community welcomes a wide range of diverse perspectives and expertise in the field of sustainability transitions with strong representation across the globe. Our sister network, the Network for early career researchers in Sustainability Transitions (NEST), is run by, and caters to, PhD and early career researchers.