according to plan. It can primarily be diagnosed when looking back from the future.
Yet, if the sustainable development community understands that the degree of
change necessary to reach its goals cannot fall short of being transformational,
science should help the community to get a grip on which change strategies and
initiatives seem promising. If transformational change is defined as radical because
a system’s dynamics, components and architecture have been changed, two questions arise: how can a radical degree of reconfiguration be intentionally pursued?
And how can the system dynamics be altered to this degree without causing collapse or rejection?
In order to answer these questions it is crucial to once again link back to
purposefully acting individuals who engage with one another and nature to produce
the goods and services they deem necessary or beneficial to their well-being. Such
engagement involves the creation of facilitating institutions and technologies that
amount to what transition research calls socio-technical systems (STS’s). Hence,
each of the systems is designed to fulfill a particular purpose, so understanding this
purpose will shed light on where to find core drivers of its current dynamics. This
also means that when the goals and ends of the system are in question, innovation
strategies should first focus on defining a new purpose, and then coordinating
updates of technologies and institutions with that purpose (Leadbeater and Mulgan
2013: 46).
The sustainable development agenda called the outcomes of the old economic
growth path into question, but most of its strategies have fallen short of defining a
new guiding purpose: they kept economic growth and tried to quickly provide yet
more of it—just with less environmental damage. Current statistics show that
simply driving the system to do more is not enough if a real change is needed, as the
following quote from UNDESA’s 2012 Back to Our Common Future report
highlights: “Even if we succeeded in pushing our technological capabilities to the
utmost, without doing something else, in a few decades we are likely to end up in a
world that would offer reduced opportunities for our children and grandchildren to
flourish” (UNDESA 2012: iii).
In the “doing something else” we find the benchmark for a transformational
agenda. It has to start with what is captured by the heuristic ‘repurposing a system’—e.g., properly replacing the pole star of economic growth with that of sustainable development. To do so one should, I argue here, check if the prevailing
mind-sets or paradigms and the models and measures they inform can guide
repurposing strategies—or also need to be shifted.
Radical incremental transformation: However, declaring a radically different
purpose and even clearly seeing which flawed assumptions and unhelpful path
dependencies stand in its way will of course not magically transform them. This
requires intense work of an often highly political character and the acceptance that it
takes time. Seeking to change a system too swiftly or too drastically is likely to
create self-defensive or destabilizing reactions. The art of system innovation
therefore entails finding the right steps and measures at the right time, and also
being prepared to deal with unexpected results.
1.2 Structure of the Book
7
Yet, if the sustainable development community understands that the degree of
change necessary to reach its goals cannot fall short of being transformational,
science should help the community to get a grip on which change strategies and
initiatives seem promising. If transformational change is defined as radical because
a system’s dynamics, components and architecture have been changed, two questions arise: how can a radical degree of reconfiguration be intentionally pursued?
And how can the system dynamics be altered to this degree without causing collapse or rejection?
In order to answer these questions it is crucial to once again link back to
purposefully acting individuals who engage with one another and nature to produce
the goods and services they deem necessary or beneficial to their well-being. Such
engagement involves the creation of facilitating institutions and technologies that
amount to what transition research calls socio-technical systems (STS’s). Hence,
each of the systems is designed to fulfill a particular purpose, so understanding this
purpose will shed light on where to find core drivers of its current dynamics. This
also means that when the goals and ends of the system are in question, innovation
strategies should first focus on defining a new purpose, and then coordinating
updates of technologies and institutions with that purpose (Leadbeater and Mulgan
2013: 46).
The sustainable development agenda called the outcomes of the old economic
growth path into question, but most of its strategies have fallen short of defining a
new guiding purpose: they kept economic growth and tried to quickly provide yet
more of it—just with less environmental damage. Current statistics show that
simply driving the system to do more is not enough if a real change is needed, as the
following quote from UNDESA’s 2012 Back to Our Common Future report
highlights: “Even if we succeeded in pushing our technological capabilities to the
utmost, without doing something else, in a few decades we are likely to end up in a
world that would offer reduced opportunities for our children and grandchildren to
flourish” (UNDESA 2012: iii).
In the “doing something else” we find the benchmark for a transformational
agenda. It has to start with what is captured by the heuristic ‘repurposing a system’—e.g., properly replacing the pole star of economic growth with that of sustainable development. To do so one should, I argue here, check if the prevailing
mind-sets or paradigms and the models and measures they inform can guide
repurposing strategies—or also need to be shifted.
Radical incremental transformation: However, declaring a radically different
purpose and even clearly seeing which flawed assumptions and unhelpful path
dependencies stand in its way will of course not magically transform them. This
requires intense work of an often highly political character and the acceptance that it
takes time. Seeking to change a system too swiftly or too drastically is likely to
create self-defensive or destabilizing reactions. The art of system innovation
therefore entails finding the right steps and measures at the right time, and also
being prepared to deal with unexpected results.
1.2 Structure of the Book
7