Advanced Introduction to Sustainability Transitions

Elgar Advanced Introductions are stimulating and thoughtful introductions to major fields in the social sciences, business and law, expertly written by the world’s leading scholars. Designed to be accessible yet rigorous, they offer concise and lucid surveys of the substantive academic and policy issues associated with discrete subject areas.

Frank W. Geels provides an insightful and evidenced introduction to one of the most important and dynamic topics in contemporary debates on how to address grand challenges like climate change and biodiversity loss.

This book outlines current theories and research avenues in the rapidly growing field of sustainability transitions. Using a diverse range of empirical case studies, it emphasises the role of green innovations in relation to business, user, political, and cultural contexts in situated energy, mobility, and food systems. To capture this, the book shows how insights from mainstream disciplines have been integrated into the multi-level perspective, which has become the field’s central middle-range conceptual framework.

Written in an accessible style, this Advanced Introduction is vital for students and scholars of development economics, innovation, environmental politics and policy, sustainability studies and human geography.

Key Features:

• Interdisciplinary in scope
• Discusses essential characteristics, theories, frameworks and actors of sustainability transitions
• Covers topics including incumbent firm resistance and reorientation, the role of the state, policy instrument mixes and policymaking processes, social justice, grassroots innovation, consumption, emerging economies and geopolitics

Frank W. Geels, Eddie Davies Professor of Sustainability Transitions, Alliance Manchester Business School, University of Manchester, UK