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Institutional entrepreneurship research has described and conceptualized dramatic cases of successful institutional change. We know less about whether it can help people trying to change institutions, for example, struggling to change the energy system. Do concepts from the institutional entrepreneurship literature offer sustainable energy practitioners insights on the political aspects of their work? And vice-versa: do practitioners have useful insights on the potential and limits of agency in institutional change? The present study contributes to these questions through collaborative inquiry together with government-affiliated organizations with a mission to promote sustainable energy. The results suggest that concepts from the institutional entrepreneurship literature do serve to make practitioners' implicit competencies explicit and hence a legitimate subject for organizational development and joint learning about the political aspects of energy systems change. We conclude that institutional entrepreneurship appears to require a form of organizing that combines environmental scanning, grand strategy and everyday tactical moves on the ground. ; Peer reviewed

Institutional entrepreneurship research has described and conceptualized dramatic cases of successful institutional change. We know less about whether it can help people trying to change institutions, for example, struggling to change the energy system. Do concepts from the institutional entrepreneurship literature offer sustainable energy practitioners insights on the political aspects of their work? And vice-versa: do practitioners have useful insights on the potential and limits of agency in institutional change? The present study contributes to these questions through collaborative inquiry together with government-affiliated organizations with a mission to promote sustainable energy. The results suggest that concepts from the institutional entrepreneurship literature do serve to make practitioners' implicit competencies explicit and hence a legitimate subject for organizational development and joint learning about the political aspects of energy systems change. We conclude that institutional entrepreneurship appears to require a form of organizing that combines environmental scanning, grand strategy and everyday tactical moves on the ground.

This paper depicts how cultural resonance for novel technologies is constructed as a gradual, interactive process. We adopt a cultural framing perspective and strive to understand how actors assign meaning to the novel technology and determine its appropriateness for the local context. Existing research has largely focused on the strategic and political aspects of field framing processes through depicting conscious framing struggles between protagonist and antagonist actors. In addition to such strategic framing activities, we examine how other socio-cultural factors, such as changes in actor positions, interaction between framing activities, and the cultural "repertoire" of frames interact in producing cultural resonance. For our empirical case study, we followed the emerging technological field of solar energy during an intensive period of change. Our study contributes to the growing number of studies that draw attention to the creation of cultural resonance as an interactive multi-actor process by offeringin-depth understanding of the multifaceted interactions that constitute the meaning-making process for an emerging field. ; Peer reviewed

This paper depicts how cultural resonance for novel technologies is constructed as a gradual, interactive process. We adopt a cultural framing perspective and strive to understand how actors assign meaning to the novel technology and determine its appropriateness for the local context. Existing research has largely focused on the strategic and political aspects of field framing processes through depicting conscious framing struggles between protagonist and antagonist actors. In addition to such strategic framing activities, we examine how other socio-cultural factors, such as changes in actor positions, interaction between framing activities, and the cultural "repertoire" of frames interact in producing cultural resonance. For our empirical case study, we followed the emerging technological field of solar energy during an intensive period of change. Our study contributes to the growing number of studies that draw attention to the creation of cultural resonance as an interactive multi-actor process by offering in-depth understanding of the multifaceted interactions that constitute the meaning-making process for an emerging field. ; Peer reviewed

The behaviour of incumbent energy companies is critical for a transition to a sustainable energy system. We address the recent call for closer conceptualisation of power and agency within transition studies by combining concepts of strategic action fields (Fligstein and McAdam, 2012) and the flat-ontology perspective of arenas of development (Jørgensen, 2012) to identify potential ruptures emerging on the micro scale in the field of sustainable energy. We investigate how new actor configurations in new experimental arenas open field rules for renegotiation. We provide a long-term analysis on how traditional energy field rules have emerged, how two of the most powerful energy companies in Finland have responded to the emergence of sustainable energy and how new forms of collaborations are emerging in the space created by new arenas of development that create ruptures within the incumbent energy coalition. ; Peer reviewed

This article examines how local experiments and negotiation processes contribute to social and field-level learning. The analysis is framed within the niche development literature, which offers a framework for analyzing the relation between projects in local contexts and the transfer of local experiences into generally applicable rules. The authors examine 2 case studies drawn from a meta-analysis of 27 new energy projects. The case studies, both pertaining to biogas projects for local municipalities, illustrate the diversity of applications for a technology through processes of local variation and selection. The authors examine the diversity of expectations and the negotiation and alignment of these expectations underlying the diversity of local solutions. Moreover, the authors address how the transfer of lessons from individual local experiments can follow different pathways and yet always require due attention to the social and cultural limits to the transferability of solutions.

Sustainability transitions require new policy pathways that significantly reduce the environmental impacts caused by, for example, energy production, mobility and food production. Transition management (TM) is one of the approaches aiming at the creation of new ways to govern transitions. It uses transitions arenas (TA) as a key process and platform where new policy pathways are created in collaboration with multiple (frontrunner) stakeholders. TM's ambitious and demanding agenda is not easy to implement. There is a continued need for testing and developing new ways of carrying out its key processes. We redesigned the TA process in the context of energy system change in Finland by 2030, focusing on interim goals, mid-range change pathways and developing a new notation system that allows participants to directly create the pathways. The resulting renewed TA process results in more specific and detailed mid-range pathways that provide more concreteness to how to implement long-term transition goals. It helps tobridge longterm national visions/strategies and low carbon experiments that are already running. The Finnish TA work created eight ambitious change pathways, pointing towards new and revised policy goals for Finland and identifying specific policy actions. Evaluation of the TA, 6-9 months after its completion underscores that an effective TA needs to be embedded by design in the particular political context that it seeks to influence. It is too early to say to what degree the pathways will be followed in practice but there are positive signs already. ; Peer reviewed