Beyond the Technological Revolution Series- Is Smart Green Growth the Solution?

Beyond the Technological Revolution is a four-year research project led by Carlota Perez, as a continuation of the work done for her 2002 book Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital: the Dynamics of Bubbles and Golden Ages (Edward Elgar). Her research explores the relationship between technology and economic development, between finance and technological diffusion and between technical and institutional…

A Guide to Deep Transitions

The theory behind how societies change over time, and what compels these changes, must be explored to understand the future. Deep Transitions theory makes sense of what has happened in the past, while Sustainability Transitions along with Transformative Innovation Policy theory and practice, enables reflection on future transformations. This guide is an introduction to the Transitions…

Deep transitions: Theorizing the long-term patterns of sociotechnical change

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 years. Extending the…

Deep Transitions: Emergence, acceleration, stabilization and directionality

Journal Article | Founding Deep Transitions Paper Industrial society has not only led to high levels of wealth and welfare in the Western world, but also to increasing global ecological degradation and social inequality. The socio-technical systems that underlay contemporary societies have substantially contributed to these outcomes. This paper proposes that these sociotechnical systems are…

International organisations and the governance of deep transitions: The case of a transition towards a circular economy

This paper contributes to a recent strand of work within the field of sustainability transitions that combines the multi-level perspective on socio-technical transitions with techno-economic paradigm thinking. Schot and Kanger (2018) and Kanger and Schot (2018) developed a framework which aims to explain the emergence, acceleration, stabilization and directionality of deep transitions. They define a…

The Role of War in Deep Transitions: Exploring Mechanisms, Imprints and Rules in Sociotechnical Systems

This paper builds on the Deep Transitions (DT) framework to explore in what ways the two World Wars influenced transitions in the sociotechnical systems of energy, food and transport. The role of war is an underexplored aspect in both Techno-Economic Paradigms (TEP) approach and the Multi-level perspective (MLP) which form the two key conceptual building…