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This book introduces transition management as a new mode of governance for sustainable development. Transition management combines a conceptual approach on social complexity, governance and long-term structural societal change with an operational governance model to actually work towards sustainability through learning-by- doing and doing-by-learning. The basic rationale behind transition management is that we are faced with societal problems of such complexity and magnitude, that existing approaches do not suffice. Such persistent problems can be found in many areas of society: energy, mobility, agriculture, water management, but also in health care, education, construction and industry. In these areas agreement upon definitions of sustainability the best solutions is impossible to achieve so that top-down planning is impossible, while at the same time sustainability can also never be achieved solely through bottom- up innovation and liberalization: sustainable development re! quires taking into account collective goods, future needs and un certain future development. Transition management aims to deal with persistent societal problems through combining long-term envisioning, short-term experiments in a selective participatory process that supports policy integration, social learning and social innovation. It focuses on frontrunners, entrepreneurs, niche-actors and innovative individuals and organizations in general that are committed to sustainable development. More often than not, innovations that in the long-term could contribute to sustainable development are unable to break through because of for example fragmentation, lack of means and support, limited attention to external (socio-economic) factors or lack of exposure. By simultaneously raising awareness and political acceptance for sustainable development in a specific area and by developing more coherence, cooperation and strategic capabilities at the level of the innovations, a structured process of social experimentation and learning can evolve that gradually leads to fundamenta! l structures in our societal systems. The central instrument for transition management is the transition arena: a scientifically underpinned operational model for coordinating and structuring transition management processes (especially in the predevelopment phase). The transition arena is a mental, physical and institutional space for experimentation, envisioning and network-building that is legitimized by regular policy. In the transition arena, different types of innovators with various backgrounds, perspectives and ambitions are brought together and develop shared long-term perspectives and a transition agenda that increasingly will influence regular policy. This approach has been introduced into research and policy in the Netherlands in 2001 and since then successfully applied in areas of sustainable energy, mobility, agriculture and housing . It has also been adopted as a new paradigm and approach in multi-disciplinary research . This book covers offers insight into the first five years of development of theory and practice of transition management in the Netherlands. As such, it is a unique account of an innovative experiment in policy theory and practice that is highly relevant for sustainable development in the international context.

Sustainable development is rapidly moving from the periphery to the mainstream of politics, business, and science. Over the past several years, a strong consensus has started to emerge that some of the major global problems can only be overcome through large-scale concerted action. Recent additions to the debate include the reports by the International Panel on Climate Change, the Stern Report on the economics of climate change, Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth and, perhaps less known, the Potsdam Memorandum1. The latter communication was recently presented by a broad group of Nobel laureates and is titled "The Great Transformation." The statement pleads for fundamental changes in our economies and societies and asks

Many countries are committed to sustainability but are struggling with how to do this. Most countries opted for sustainability councils and the development of sustainability indicators. The Dutch government followed a different track. It believed that sustainability requires some fundamental changes in functional systems of for example energy, transport and agriculture. It conceptualised the quest towards sustainability as an issue of managing transitions in functional systems. In this paper we examine why the Dutch government became interested in transitions. We will see that transition management was attractive because it allowed different ministries to pursue their own agenda but in a different way: with more attention to innovation and learning. We will look at the model of transition management and the Dutch policies for managing the energy transition. The model is believed to be an interesting model of governance, employing an integrative and multi-scale framework for policy deliberation, choice of instruments, and actions by individuals, private and public organizations, helping society to escape lock-in while avoiding new evolutionary traps.

The term transition is a key term of the fourth national environmental policy plan (NMP4, 2001), which put forward transition management (Rotmans et al, 2000) as a new policy approach for dealing with persistent and highly complex societal problems such as climate change, loss of biodiversity, overexploitation of resources and health risks related to the use of dangerous, non-natural substances. The NMP4 selected the energy supply, mobility, agriculture and the use of biodiversity and natural resources as priorities for developing transition management activities. The Ministry of Economic Affairs (holding responsibility over energy and innovation policy) has since the NMP4 been the leading actor in the so-called 'energy-transition'. Several activities have been undertaken, based on the basic principles underlying transition management; long term visions as framework for short-term action, a multi-actor approach and a focus on learning and experiments. The approach has stimulated the involvement of a large number of stakeholders and led to the developments of shared visions, ambitions and strategies, experiments and projects. Besides, the approach itself has generated questions regarding regular policies, for example innovation and technology policies, and led to debates on policy integration and barriers in existing regulations. This discussion has been actively picked up by the Ministry and governmental advisory boards for energy and environment (Energieraad and VROM-raad 2004). It is an example of policy learning in which it was believed that sustainability requires some fundamental changes in functional systems, which in turn require policy-innovation. In this paper we will look at why the Ministry was interested in fostering an energy transition (where we will see that economic reasons, notably the willingness to create green energy business, was an important consideration). The paper will describe the policies and stakeholder process, which will be assessed from a transition management perspective. This means that the paper uses the multi-level, multi-phase transition management framework (Loorbach 2004b) to evaluate the energy-transition approach as developed by the ministry of Economic Affairs, in terms of content (what types of visions and experiments are developed?) and in terms of process (what kind of actors are involved, what instruments are used?). Special attention will be given to the nature of the policies developed and their difference with and implications for 'regular' policies. We will compare the difference with past policies and the changes in the system of governance. The paper will also seek to answer a more speculative issue: What are the prospects of the Dutch approach to achieve a transition and a flourishing sustainable energy business?

Over the last decades, we have witnessed a shift from the centralized government-based nation-state, towards liberalized, market based and decentralized decision-making structures. Due to societal developments the power of central government to make policies and implement these has decreased, leading to increasingly diffuse policy-making structures and processes stratified across sub-national, national and supra-national levels of government (Hooghe and Marks 2001). Generally referred to with the term 'governance' (Kooiman 1993), the current practice of government in making policy is in interaction with a diversity of societal actors. At the European level, this development has led to multi-level, participatory decision-making structures in which for example regions are dealing directly with EU-offices, NGO's and businesses are involved in the development of policies and top-down decisions are limited to the politically most controversial issues. But governance has also become common practice at the global as well as on a regional scale, where influence of non-governmental organizations (NGO's), business and science slowly becomes part of policy-making.

Our modern complex society and its problems of realizing long-term sustainable development necessitate new forms of governance. In recent years a number of publications have been made on transition management as a new mode of governance that explicitly deals with societal complexity (D. Loorbach, 2007; J. Rotmans, Grin, Schot, & Smits, 2004; J. Rotmans, Kemp, & Van Asselt, 2001). This approach towards dealing with governance and complexity explicitly links analysis of complexity to the governance hereof. Observed dynamics in society provide the basis for formulating governance strategies and instruments, while the implementation of transition management simultaneously leads to more precise or altered interpretations of observed reality. Transition management as formulated in (D. Loorbach, 2007) presents a framework for structuring governance processes directed towards societal innovation. This framework distinguishes between different types of activities (strategic, tactical and operational) and different phases (envisioning, agenda-building, experimentation and evaluation). The basic assumption is that this framework is generic and can be used to implement transition management within any specific context (being a specific policy domain or political culture). The proposed paper aims to illustrate how the framework can be used to implement transition management and under which conditions such an implementation of transition management can be successful. This will be done by analyzing the project 'Sustainable Living and Housing in Flanders', in which the two authors functioned as project leaders.

'Transition' and 'transformation' have become buzzwords in political and scientific discourses. They signal the need for large-scale changes to achieve a sustainable society. We compare how they are applied and interpreted in scientific literatures to explore whether they are distinct concepts and provide complementary insights. Transition and transformation are not mutually exclusive; they provide nuanced perspectives on how to describe, interpret and support desirable radical and non-linear societal change. Their differences may partially result from their etymological origins, but they largely stem from the different research communities concerned with either transition or transformation. Our review shows how the respective approaches and perspectives on understanding and interpreting system change can enrich each other.

In this paper we present the transition approach as an integrated perspective to understand and possibly orient our society towards sustainable development. Transition management is based upon complex adaptive system thinking and seeks to deal with ongoing changes in society in an evolutionary manner so as to influence these ongoing changes in terms of speed and direction: towards sustainability. Since the concept of sustainability is inherently normative, subjective and ambiguous, we argue that (unlike some more traditional approaches to sustainable development) we should focus on an open facilitation and stimulation of social processes towards sustainability. Transition perspective poses novel challenges for research: there are no unequivocal answers, nor is it clear how these processes should be governed. We thus end this paper by formulating the basic research questions central to the search for governance for sustainability.

Transition management has rapidly emerged over the past few years as a new approach to dealing with complex societal problems and governance in the context of these problems. In the Netherland, UK and Belgium, serious efforts have been and are being undertaken to develop transition policies in areas such as energy, building, mobility and water management. This is the result of a much broader scientific development of transition research as an interdisciplinary field of study in which innovation studies, history, ecology and modeling are combined with sociology, political and governance studies and even psychology. Because of the focus on integrated sustainability problems and the applied nature of transition research, the natural interaction between science and policy has led to a continuous co-evolving theory and practice of transition management. The emergence of transition management as a new paradigm for governance and research has surprised many researchers and policy-makers, leading to skepticism and doubts as well as enthusiasm and new élan. How was it possible that a new approach that aims to promote transitions, in fact evolutionary revolutions fundamentally altering existing regimes, could be taken up so quickly by policy and was able to simultaneously develop scientifically into a, still very young, discipline? This paper describes the predevelopment phase leading up to the introduction of transition management as national policy in the Netherlands. It will explain the following development as a result of the co-production process between research and policy in which all elements that constitute the transition management approach were brought together. The paper will show that these basic elements were already being developed and implemented for years but had to come together in an active co-production process to become integrated and internalized. Since its introduction into the policy arena, transition management has been widely debated, challenged, tested, and because of this further developed, enriched and grounded scientifically. The debate concerning the 'manageability' and predictability of transitions has been picked up by Meadowcroft (2005, 2007), Shove and Walker (2007), who warn against possible pitfalls concerning transition management and raise interesting questions regarding scope, effectivity and legitimacy. In their commentaries, they thus touch upon relevant issues, but especially Shove and Walker seem unaware of most of the research and practical experiences of the last years. They for example seem unaware of the social systems approach underlying transition management, the focus on the role of immaterial elements and consumers in transitions, the reflexive use of sustainable development as guiding instead of prescribing notion and the new insights about the role of research and researchers in transition management. In all these areas, important progress has been made. The paper will explain how the transition management approach further evolved and how it necessarily will continue to do so in the future. We will discuss in-depth major points of criticism and concern as put forward by various authors over the past years.

This paper develops a strategic perspective for business to contribute to the innovation of societal systems. Sustainability issues at the level of societal sectors cannot be addressed by single organizations but need to be thought of as systemic challenges in which business, government and civil society each play different roles. Sustainability involves structural changes over longer periods of time, and requires co-evolutionary changes in technology, economy, culture and organizational forms. We propose that the transition management framework offers a fruitful way to analyze such co-evolutionary processes of social transformation and subsequently develop strategies to infl uence and accelerate such processes. We present the case of two firms working in this new context of transition management in The Netherlands. From these cases we conceptualize a more general approach for business to redefine and reframe the societal context in which it is operating and develop novel business strategies.

The port of Rotterdam is a global leader in the fossil fuel economy, with a 50% market share for fossil fuel products in North-Western Europe. Although it is one of the most efficient and innovative ports globally, over the last decade it has seen a gradual increase of pressures on its activities and the need to develop alternative low-carbon strategies. This paper describes how a turbulent energy context, growing societal pressure and a change in the leadership of the Port Authority opened up space for a transition management process. The process impacted the business strategy and the discourse amongst its leaders and contributed to the set-up of a transition unit and a change in investments. It subsequently led to an externally oriented transition arena process with incumbent actors in the port area and actors from outside around the transition pathway to a circular and bio-based economy. By exploring how transition management could support the repositioning of incumbent actors in the energy transition, the research contributes to discussions in the transitions literature on regime destabilisation, the role of (incumbent) actors in transitions, and large-scale energy-intensive industries as the next frontier in the energy transition.

Continuing economic turbulence has fuelled debates about social and political reform as much as it has stimulated actions and initiatives aimed at a more fundamental transition of dominant economic systems. This paper takes a transition perspective to explore, from a Western European viewpoint, how the economic crisis is actually viewed through a variety of interpretations and responded to through a range of practices. We argue that framing societal phenomena such as the economic crisis

Background: Health inequities are already present at birth and affect individuals' health and socioeconomic outcomes across the life course. Addressing these inequities requires a cross-sectoral approach, covering the first 1,000 days of life. We believe that - in the Dutch context - municipal governments can be the main responsible actor to drive such an approach, since they are primarily responsible for organising adequate public health. Therefore, we aim to identify and develop transformative change towards the implementation of perinatal health into municipal approaches and policies concerning health inequities. Methods: A transition analysis will be combined with action research in six Dutch municipalities. Interviews and interactive group sessions with professionals and organisations that are relevant for the institutional embedding of perinatal health into approaches and policies regarding health inequities, will be organised in each municipality. As a follow-up, a questionnaire will be administered among all participants one year after completion of the group sessions. Discussion: We expect to gain insights into the role of municipalities in addressing perinatal health inequities, learn more about the interaction between different key stakeholders, and identify barriers and facilitators for a cross-sectoral approach to perinatal health. This knowledge will serve to inform the development of approaches to perinatal health inequities in areas with relatively poor perinatal health outcomes, both in the Netherlands and abroad.