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Governance, Innovation & Change
Transition pathways
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Transition pathways map the co-evolutionary routes through which energy regimes are restructured — connecting niche innovations, institutional change, and landscape pressures into coherent trajectories.
Why this matters
[To be drafted]
Shared definitions
A transition pathway describes a bundle of strategies and actions that support the achievement of a long-term vision, positioned in relation to — rather than separate from — social, cultural, political, economic, and institutional contexts. The pathways approach enables integrated systemic thinking about the short-, medium-, and long-term actions needed to reach a more sustainable future.1)
Within the multi-level perspective, transition pathways outline co-evolutionary developments across the layers of a socio-technical regime, consistent with and dependent on framework conditions at the landscape and niche levels. Landscape factors — long-term cultural and biophysical conditions including climate change impacts — influence the regime without being structurally influenced by regime change within a given time horizon. Niche developments, understood as innovation ecosystems, provide the space for institutional, social, technological, and business innovation at multiple regime levels.2)
Four transition pathway types
Geels and Schot (2007) identify four distinct patterns through which socio-technical regimes change, determined by the relative timing and strength of landscape pressure and niche development:3)
Table 1. Categories of flexibility needs in electricity systems, by what they address and relevant timescale.
Sources: Ma et al. (2013); Hillberg et al. (2019).
Table 1. Four sociotechnical transition pathways.
Source: Geels & Schot (2007).
| Pathway | Conditions | Mechanism |
|---|---|---|
| Transformation | Moderate landscape pressure; niche innovations not yet sufficiently developed | Regime actors modify the direction of development paths and innovation activities without regime breakdown |
| De-alignment and re-alignment | Large, sudden, divergent landscape change | Increasing regime problems cause actors to lose faith; regime erodes before a new configuration stabilises |
| Technological substitution | Strong landscape pressure; niche innovations sufficiently developed | Niche innovations break through and replace the existing regime |
| Reconfiguration | Symbiotic niche innovations adopted to solve local problems | Innovations trigger further adjustments in the basic architecture of the regime incrementally |
Regime layers
The socio-technical energy regime can be understood as four interacting layers, each with its own dynamics:4)
- Governance and institutions — regulatory frameworks, rule systems, actor networks, market institutions, and policy structures at the socio-economic meso-level
- Actors layer — incumbent and emerging actors with their strategies, wants, needs, practices, and routines at the socio-economic micro-level
- Functional — functional structures and mechanisms of energy extraction, transformation, production, storage, and distribution
- Biophysical — the biophysical foundation of materials and energy flows, including artefactual infrastructure
Enduring change within the regime is achieved only through cumulative causation: elements across the four layers interact in self-reinforcing ways. Change triggered by niche innovation in one layer must propagate across layers to produce lasting structural change.
Figure 1. Transition pathways framework: four regime layers and their relationship to landscape and niche levels.
Source: Kubeczko (2022), adapted from Foxon et al. (2010).5)
Figure 2. Ontological layers of a socio-technical energy regime.
Source: Adapted from Foxon et al. (2010).6)
Perspectives
Actors and stakeholders
Technologies and infrastructure
Institutional structures
Distinctions and overlaps
Transition pathway vs. scenario
Scenarios describe plausible future states without prescribing how to reach them. Transition pathways describe the co-evolutionary routes by which a regime transformation unfolds, connecting actions and strategies across timescales. A pathway has an explicit normative orientation and a long-term vision as its endpoint; a scenario may be exploratory and value-neutral. See Scenarios.
Transition pathway vs. transition
A transition is the outcome — the systemic reconfiguration of a socio-technical regime. A transition pathway is the analytical description of the route through which that reconfiguration occurs. The same transition may be interpreted through different pathway types depending on which actors, pressures, and timescales are emphasised. See Transitions.
Related topics
Transitions · Scenarios · Governance · Innovation policy · Systems · Change
Topic notes
Content notes from source material:
- The Kubeczko (2022) framework distinguishes a socio-ecological layer that existing MLP literature does not always include explicitly — worth flagging as an ISGAN-specific extension when perspectives are drafted.