Journal Article | Founding Deep Transitions Paper The contemporary world is confronted by a double challenge: environmental degradation and social inequality. This challenge is linked to the dynamics of the First Deep Transition (Schot, 2016): the creation and expansion of a wide range of socio-technical systems in a similar direction over the past 200–250…
What is the Deep Transitions Research Project?
Since the Industrial Revolution, the world has experienced various surges of economic and social development. This has led to modern societies as we know them today. In the Deep Transition project, we explore underlying drivers for the establishment of these modern societies, but from an unusual angle. We explore how shared values and rules are adopted by many people and organisations. Traditionally, these values and rules embrace fossil fuels; linear wasteful production; centralised, globalised mass-production and consumption. This has led to a number of ‘socio-technical systems’ or infrastructures for the provision of food, health, mobility, energy, communication, education, finance that are unsustainable. This is the First Deep Transition. At the end of the twentieth century, the characteristics of these systems have become the root cause of both the climate and inequality crises.
The Deep Transition research project looks at how these rules, values and systems were made, and can be unmade.
How can we work towards a Second Deep Transition? We examine if there is change and fragmentation away from the old values and rules – ‘extract, use, dispose, carbonize, scale, globalize, centralize’ – to new ones. Are we seeing fresh approaches in business, civil society and policymaking that have at their heart the principles of sustainability, circular economy, social and environmental justice?
What role will business, social movements, governments, the military, international organisations, civil society, and even, war and other catastrophes, play?
Are the global and national systems beginning to realign under a fresh set of standards, values and rules that would create a different trajectory? A Sustainability Revolution, equal to the Industrial Revolution? Not Industry 4.0 but Sustainability 1.0…
This research project takes a long term perspective. It is based at the Science Policy Research Unit at the University of Sussex Business School, the Utrecht University Centre for Global Challenges and is funded by James Anderson from the investment bank Baillie Gifford. It seeks to answer if the world is changing fundamentally and irrevocably onto an entirely new path; one marked – The Second Deep Transition.
Professor Johan Schot explains Deep Transitions thinking. He is founder of the Deep Transition Research Project & author (w. Dr Kanger) of the Deep Transitions theory papers. Previously, he was Director of the Science Policy Research Unit (SPRU), and is currently Professor in Comparative Global History at the University of Utrecht’s Centre for Global Challenges.
