This article explores the links between agency, institutions, and innovation in navigating shifts and large-scale transformations toward global sustainability. Our central question is whether social and technical innovations can reverse…
Tipping towards sustainability: emerging pathways of transformation
Opening Up the Politics of Knowledge and Power in Bioscience
Recent years have seen growing worldwide discussions, experiments, and expectations around various kinds of public engagement in the biosciences. This is especially so, in the governance of biotechnology—in research policy,…
Shaping agricultural innovation systems responsive to food insecurity and climate change
Climate change and variability present new challenges for agriculture, particularly for smallholder farmers who continue to be the mainstay of food production in developing countries. Recent global food crises have…
Living with Materiality or Confronting Asian Diversity? The Case of Iron-Biofortified Rice Research in the Philippines
This article draws on findings from a multi-sited study of international science policy processes in rice biofortification. It focuses on the ten-year period between the discovery of a “high-iron” elite…
The politics of global assessments: the case of the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD)
The IAASTD – the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development – which ran between 2003 and 2008, involving over 400 scientists worldwide, was an ambitious attempt…
The Alternative Technology Movement: An Analysis of its Framing and Negotiation of Technology Development
Technology mediates our relations with one another and with nature. Modern environmentalism recognised this from its inception. Alternative Technology (AT) activists called for innovations which would pre-figure ecological society. This…
The governance of sustainable socio-technical transitions
A quasi-evolutionary model of socio-technical transitions is described in which regimes face selection pressures continuously. Differentiated transition contexts determine the form and direction of regime change in response to these…
Theoretical foundations of learning processes for sustainable development
Social-ecological systems are co-evolving systems. Of particular relevance are here: (1) co-evolution of the environment and governance, (2) co-evolution of technology and governance, and (3) co-evolution of human behaviour and…
Translating Sustainabilities between Green Niches and Socio-Technical Regimes
A role for green niches has risen to prominence in the environment and innovation literature. The role of idealistic enthusiasts in the creation of sustainability initiatives in niches is widely…
Sustainability
As a consummately effective ‘boundary term’, able to link disparate groups on the basis of a broad common agenda, ‘sustainability’ has moved a long way from its technical association with…