The transition towards a sustainable and healthy food system is one of the major sustainability challenges of today, next to the energy transition and the transition from a linear to circular economy. This paper provides a timely and evidence-based contribution to better understand the complex processes of institutional change and transformative social-ecological innovation that takes place in the food transition, through a case study of an open innovation and food transition network in The Netherlands, the South-Holland Food Family (Zuid-Hollandse Voedselfamilie). This network is supported by the provincial government and many partners, with the ambition to realize more sustainable agricultural and food chains, offering healthy, sustainable and affordable food for everyone in the Province of South-Holland in five to ten years from now. This ambition cannot be achieved through optimising the current food system. A transition is needed – a fundamental change of the food system’s structure, culture and practice. The Province has adopted a transition approach in its 2016 Innovation Agenda for Sustainable Agriculture. This paper provides an institutional analysis of how the transition approach has been established and developed in practice. Our main research question is what interventions and actions have shaped the transition approach and how does the dynamic interplay between actors and institutional structures influence institutional change, by analysing a series of closely related action situations and their context, looking at 'structure' and 'agency', and at the output-outcomes-impact of these action situations. For this purpose, we use the Transformative Social-Ecological Innovation (TSEI)-framework to study the dynamic interplay between actors and institutional structures influencing institutional change. The example of TSEI-framework application in this paper shows when and how local agents change the institutional context itself, which provides relevant insights on institutional work and the mutually constitutive nature of structure and agency. Above institutional analysis also shows the pivotal role of a number of actors, such as network facilitators and provincial minister, and their capability and skills to combine formal and informal institutional environments and logics and mobilize resources, thereby legitimizing and supporting the change effort. The results are indicative of the importance of institutional structures as both facilitating (i.e., the province’s policies) and limiting (e.g. land ownership) transition dynamics.
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De eerste vier jaar van het lectoraat Image in Context van het Kenniscentrum Kunst en Samenleving – onderdeel van de Hanzehogeschool Groningen – wordt gemarkeerd met de tentoonstelling We, people in transition. De tentoonstelling toont een selectie van de projecten die het lectoraat, onder leiding van dr. Anke Coumans, de afgelopen vier jaar uitvoerde. De titel van de tentoonstelling benadrukt hoe niet alleen onze omgeving in transitie is, maar ook hoe wij mensen dat zijn. De beeldende ontmoetingen van de tentoonstelling hebben deze transitie niet alleen vastgelegd maar haar ook veroorzaakt.
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Paper presented online at the International Sustainability Transitions conference 2020, Wien, Austria
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This chapter explores how various organizations are engaging millennials inthe energy transition. In the climate accord from Paris, almost all countriesin the world agreed upon reducing greenhouse gasses, so climate change willbe limited. In order to do so, we do need to cut down on our use of fossil fuelsand we do need to alter our behaviour. In this chapter, we study how organizations are engaging with young people, often referred to as millennials onthis subject. Millennials are seen as digital natives, and they grew up withdigital communication. Do organizations engage millennials in this energytransition and engage them in a way that millennials do communicate? Ourstudy showed that, with a few exceptions, organizations do not use interactivemedia and elements that millennials use, and in this, do not engage millennials to join in the energy transition. We give some suggestions on how organizations can engage millennials to a larger extent
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This report is a deliverable of the ESTRAC “Case Studies Regional Energy Transition” project, commissioned and funded by the research institute Energy Systems Transition Centre (ESTRAC). ESTRAC is a joint initiative of knowledge and research institutes in the Netherlands – including TNO, ECN (since April 2018 part of TNO), University of Groningen, Hanze University of Applied Sciences, the New Energy Coalition (NEC) and, more recently, PBL – as well as associated partners including Gasunie, Gasterra, EBN and NAM. In addition to funding from the ESTRAC partners, the Case Studies Regional Energy Transition project has benefitted from funding by the Green Deal program of the Dutch government.
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This paper describes a research about the changing role and competences of teachers and the willingness of the teachers to change. The researchers developed and conducted a survey at Fontys University of Applied Sciences department engineering to find out how teachers teach and how they would want to teach. The conclusion drawn from this research results in five subjects of attention: 1 To investigate new teaching competences 2 To investigate new teaching strategies 3 To develop collaborating professional environments for teachers 4 To develop a formal declaration of how companies can participate effectively in the process of the transition of youngsters to professional practitioners 5 To investigate how the organization should change their culture and structure towards a professional learning environment for students and teachers. The above mentioned items will be subject of further research in the coming study year. The main goal is to develop a business case or strategic plan on how to implement change in teaching engineering education.
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We are confronted with increasingly pressing questions about economic and social transition. Things have to change, but how? We believe that this change is concerned with three closely related challenges, which we call the triple transition—climate, energy, and...
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The urban energy transition is crucial for a sustainable future. To support this transition, Digital Twins are employed in an increasing fashion, providing decision makers with data-driven insights from mainly technological perspectives. Based on a case study of a neighbourhood in a Dutch municipality, we argue the need to address social perspectives more explicitly while employing Digital Twins. To this end, we identify three potential strategies for an integrated socio-technological approach for Digital Twins. These strategies are modelling social characteristics at a macro-economic scale, involving stakeholders in participatory approaches, and finally explicitly modelling stakeholder behaviour. Given its promise for our case study, we elaborate this last strategy with a conceptual method that aims to explicitly model citizens’ decision-making processes through an agent-based modelling approach.
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The 2018 IPCC Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5 °C once again highlighted (and with increased urgency) the benefits of immediate, extreme decarbonisation efforts in order to minimise the negative impacts of climate change. Achieving such demanding global targets requires concerted national, subnational, and local efforts. In combination, these efforts result in transition pathways. Implementation of the technologies and policies at the heart of such pathways is often considered as inherently positive, thus the immediate risks associated with the pathway are the barriers faced on implementation. However, successful implementation of a climate change mitigation policy may also have potentially negative consequences. On either side a host of more abstract uncertainties increase the difficultly of decision making. In this chapter, we provide a synthesis of eleven low-carbon transition pathways from across the globe and explore the risks and uncertainties associated with them. We structure our discussion around three nested dimensions present in all pathways: technological innovations implemented in a local context; policy mixes promoting these technologies; and society, where social-economic priorities may lead individuals and communities to support or oppose the low-carbon pathway. Across these themes, we also explore the meaning of scale and stakeholders’ perceptions of time in low-carbon pathways. Our discussion reflects the complexity associated with assessing risks in contested settings. While many of these risks are context specific and reflect a broad range of stakeholder perspectives, common risks are found across the case studies, regardless of the local context, the technology promoted, and the policy mix implemented.
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The Utrecht SBE16 Conference. From the introduction: "The conference is part of the Sustainable Built conference series and is as such considered to be part of the pre-eminent international conference series on sustainable building and construction endorsed by iiSBE, UNEP-SBO and FIDIC. The Utrecht SBE16 conference is hosted by the Centre of Expertise Smart Sustainable Cities of HU University of Applied Sciences Utrecht, in partnership with six Dutch Universities of Applied Sciences (Avans, Saxion, Rotterdam, The Hague, Zuyd, InHolland) and the Utrecht Sustainability Institute (USI). The Transition Zero conference provides us with a unique opportunity to meet transition professionals in urban sustainability from all over Europe and beyond and to learn about the latest developments and best (inter)national practices in urban sustainability. The rich interest in the conference, made it possible to offer research as well as practitioner-driven tracks on topics related to the conference title. The conference brought together excellent future-minded practitioners, researchers and thought leaders from the R&I community, specialists and professionals on zero energy homes and transition of the built environment."
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