The double hermeneutic of sustainability transitions

Grassroots Initiatives as Sustainability Transition Pioneers: Implications and Lessons for Urban Food Systems

“…Through networking with the wider society or regime, information and reflection are spread, and niche building is significantly enhanced. Partnerships legitimize and institutionalize alternative processes and embed them in standardized ones [21,28,34,36,38,63,96,97]. Relations are key to obtain political support.…”

“…Local food initiatives generate "multiple-bottom line" outcomes [49] (p. 321). Most grassroots initiatives do not only develop technological innovations but also social and organizational ones, tailored to local settings, e.g., new forms of coordination, land provision, procurement and knowledge transfer that coevolve over time, leading to the collective construction of a vision of the desired type of systems and the role of different actors therein [21,34,72,75]. Compared with market criteria dominating conventional regimes, innovations for sustainability often perform poorly [61].…”

“…With their innovative approaches, they question the established systems and power structures therein, amplify irritations and may ultimately delegitimize the status quo [21,22,38,39,61,68,76]. When their advocates present realistic solutions to the instabilities, conflicts and tensions in mainstream regimes, radical niches can inform institutional reforms [20,33,57,77].…”

“…By diffusing critical knowledge and reflection, they can shift the agendas and terms of debate that are shaping future development possibilities, as well as the criteria used to assess the appropriateness of products, services and systems. In so doing, the grassroots initiatives reconnect lived experiences to social and conceptual critique, demasking the structures that govern an issue such as sustainability and suggesting actions to overcome the dominance and to mobilize more transformational policy [20][21][22]61]. In due course, grassroots initiatives, with a specific starting point that corresponds to a single component of the socio-technical system, affect various components and thus local governance [75].…”

“…Crises in multiple areas, such as climate change, the economic and the ecological crisis as well as geo-political tensions, can be viewed as symptoms of underlying, persistent unsustainability. Responses that seek to re-stabilize regimes only strengthen the lock-in to unsustainable structural, institutional and practical trajectories and deepen systemic problems [17][18][19][20][21][22]. The strong path dependencies and lock-ins in the current system [2,4,9,13,17,[20][21][22][23][24][25] thus confirm the need for sustainability transitions, that is "long-term, multi-dimensional and fundamental…”