Reconfigurations in sustainability transitions: a systematic and critical review

Abstract

Two streams of literature have become especially prominent in understanding social change toward sustainability within the past decades: the research on socio-technical transitions and applications of social practice theory. The aim of this article is to contribute to efforts to create dialogue between these two approaches. We do this by focusing on the concept of reconfiguration, which has become a much-used, but poorly defined notion in the discussion on sustainability transitions. To understand what is defined as reconfiguration in systems and practices, and how the understanding of reconfiguration in regimes could benefit from insights about reconfiguration in practices, we conducted a systematic and critical literature review of 43 journal articles. The findings showed a trend toward a focus on whole-system reconfiguration and interlinked dynamics between practices of production and consumption. However, our study suggests that a less hierarchical understanding of transitions utilizing insights from practice theory might be fruitful. Future research on sustainability transitions could benefit from addressing the tensions between and within niche and regime practices; the dynamics maintaining and challenging social and cultural norms; the efforts in creating new normalities and in recruiting actors in practices; and investigating the different roles the various actors play in these practices.

A Socio-Analytical Approach to the Integration of Drones into Health Care Systems

“…In addition, we identified eight MLP articles of relevance and included them in our discussion [26,30,40,[85][86][87][88][89].…”

“…The MLP argues that landscape pressures create "windows of opportunity" for niche technologies to emerge. However, the starting point of pressure may often come from below, from the niche of "clinical" environments that create innovations in daily practice originating from dynamics in ordinary activities and challenges, such as producing, promoting, adopting, and aligning technologies; cultivating novelties within existing regimes; enlisting users and making them available for integration into practices [89]. Nevertheless, the MLP theory may also be used to understand such processes as the creation of pressures and windows of opportunity at the landscape level.…”

“…The MLP refers to such resistance as lock-in mechanisms related to needed changes to established work processes or to the replacement of technical tools or approaches and suggests that technological innovations may divide the audience into enthusiasts and skeptics, early adopters and the fearful, and the curious and the indifferent [56]. However, from a socio-technical perspective, the challenge may lie not in people supporting or opposing the new technology but in a lack of concordance between the requirements of the technologies and the practices that people perform and have developed over time [89].…”

Reconfiguring everyday eating: Vegan Challenge discussions in social media

“…By reconfiguration, we refer to changes in the organization of the practice of eating or in relations between various food-related practices, which "engender long-term transformation in what counts as a normal and acceptable way of life" (Shove 2014, 419). Following Laakso et al (2020), unlike just any kind of change in practices, reconfiguration is a goal-oriented process (toward sustainability, for instance) that includes collective contestation and negotiation within the community of people performing the practice, and in which the changes in social norms and conventions hold a fundamental role. Since reconfigurations commonly involve the articulation of components, which can destabilize the existing practices (Welch 2020, 69), a reconfiguration in the context of vegan eating could thus be conceptualized as a problematization of existing practices of eating in the context of everyday life and socio-technical, political and economic change, and consequent development of novel practices.…”

Environmental ethics in action: relations between practices, ethics and the culture of consumer society

“…Theories of practice have proven useful and insightful in studying sustainable consumption (Shove and Spurling, 2013;Warde et al, 2017;Welch and Yates, 2018;Laakso et al, 2021). While they have shed much needed light on ordinary and inconspicuous types of consumption (Shove et al, 2009;Shove, 2010;Warde, 2014;Rinkinen et al, 2021), this perspective simultaneously also neglected certain issues, such as aspects of culture, that had played a significant role in earlier consumer research approaches (Halkier, 2020;Welch, 2020;Welch et al, 2020;Gram-Hanssen, 2021).…”