Flor Avelino

Utrecht University | UU

Facing the world's ecological, economic, and social challenges requires us to connect the concepts of justice, sustainability, and transitions. Bridging and discussing heterogeneous fields, we argue that these concepts need to complement each other, and we present just sustainability transitions (JUSTRAs) to do so. To define JUSTRAs, we review the...

How can cities be more sustainable and just? This question has guided a process of synthesizing insights from previously funded research and innovation projects that deal with approaches tackling urban sustainability and justice. As part of this process, a database in the form of a knowledge commons was developed to gather 40+ approaches: sets of i...

Social innovation is gaining attention as a pivotal dimension of socio-technical transitions with renewable energy prosumerism as a prominent example. However, this example also highlights that social innovation evokes concerns about purposes, beneficiaries, normative dilemmas and legitimacy. This paper addresses recent calls to confront the percei...

Accelerating energy transitions that are both sustainable and just remains an important challenge, and social innovation can have a key role in this transition. Here, we examine the diversity and potential of social innovation in energy systems transformation, synthesizing original mixed methods data from expert interviews, document analysis, socia...

Society is transforming through a whirlpool of innovations. This includes technological as well as social innovations, i.e. changes in social relations involving new ways of doing, organizing, framing and knowing. Especially the potentials for transformative social innovation (TSI) are gaining the interest of progressive political actors and critic...

If transdisciplinary sustainability research is to contribute to sustainability transitions, issues of power dynamics need to be understood and accounted for. However, examples of concrete methods that put this into practice are sparse. This paper presents a conceptual and methodological framework that develops a better understanding of the power p...

Academic research and policy have focused on sustainable energy transitions for addressing the societal challenge of climate change for a long time, but the concept of ‘social innovation’ has only been recently taken up. This concept refers to different social phenomena relating to changes in socio-technical systems. Moving beyond narrow perspectiv...

This article positions collective renewable energy prosumerism as a social movement that engages in energy system transformation. Collective renewable energy prosumer initiatives engage in ‘prefigurative’ work through their discursive framings (ways of thinking), their activities (ways of doing) and their understanding and enactment of social relat...

Taking RE prosumerism as a key example of social innovation in the context of the energy transition, this paper demonstrates how the dark sides of social innovation can be articulated in sustainability transitions theory. Current discussions of those dark sides hover between naïve optimism and paralyzing critique. We develop a more balanced underst...

This paper proposes a meta-theoretical framework for studying power in processes of change and innovation. Power is one of the most contested concepts in social and political theory. This paper discusses seven prevailing points of contestation: Power over versus power to, centred versus diffused, consensual versus conflictual, constraining versus e...

Social innovation is an important dimension of current transformations in energy systems. It can refer to alternative business models, novel policy instruments, financing schemes, participatory governance approaches to energy questions, or new discourses. Its significance for energy systems is often considered in narrow instrumentalist terms, reduc...

Renewable energy (RE) prosumerism comes with promises and expectations of contributing to sustainable and just energy systems. In its current process of becoming mainstream, numerous challenges and doubts have arisen whether it will live up to these. Building on insights from sustainability transitions research and institutional theory, this articl...

This paper responds to the need in innovation research for conceptual clarity and solid theory on social innovation (SI). The paper conceptualizes SI as changing social relations, involving new ways of doing, knowing, framing and organizing, and theorizes transformative social innovation (TSI) as the process of SI challenging, altering, or replacin...

This paper develops a conceptual understanding of transformative innovations as shared activities, ideas and objects across locally rooted sustainability initiatives that explore and develop alternatives to incumbent and (perceived) unsustainable regimes that they seek to challenge, alter or replace. We synthesize empirical work from two European r...

The mainstreaming of RE prosumerism amounts to a complex crossroads of multiple possible RE prosumerism futures, with very different implications in terms of citizen participation, inclusiveness and transparency. The ‘incentive structures’ shaping the RE prosumerism process have been identified by considering RE prosumerism as a bundle of new actio...

Society is transforming through a whirlpool of innovations, including technological innovations and a wide array of social innovations such as new modes of governance or ways of working and living together. As researchers and practitioners are trying to make sense of transformative innovations, they run into various paradoxes: Despite being revolut...

This article responds to increasing public and academic discourses on social innovation, which often rest on the assumption that social innovation can drive societal change and empower actors to deal with societal challenges and a retreating welfare state. In order to scrutinise this assumption, this article proposes a set of concepts to study the...

Research on sustainability transitions has expanded rapidly in the last ten years, diversified in terms of topics and geographical applications, and deepened with respect to theories and methods. This article provides an extensive review and an updated research agenda for the field, classified into nine main themes: understanding transitions; power...

Alongside current policy discourses on the transformative potentials of social innovation, social innovation initiatives also construct their own accounts of how society can be transformed and by whom. Building on state-of-the-art futures studies and narrative research and their linkages, this article unfolds these narratives of change (NoC) by soc...

What is the transformative potential of social enterprise? To be more than a fashion or a fictitious panacea, the concept of social enterprise needs to be debated. The book volume ‘Theory of Social Enterprise and Pluralism: Social Movements, Solidarity Economy, and Global South’ is edited by Philippe Eynaud, Jean-Louis Laville, Luciane dos Santos,...

This paper contributes to public and academic discussions on empowerment and social innovation by conceptualizing the mechanisms of empowerment from a social psychology perspective, and empirically exploring how people are empowered through both local and transnational linkages, i.e. translocal networks. Section 2 conceptualizes empowerment as the...

Global urbanization promises better services, stronger economies, and more connections; it also carries risks and unforeseeable consequences. To deepen our understanding of this complex process and its importance for global sustainability, we need to build interdisciplinary knowledge around a systems approach. Urban Planet takes an integrative look...

Global urbanization promises better services, stronger economies, and more connections; it also carries risks and unforeseeable consequences. To deepen our understanding of this complex process and its importance for global sustainability, we need to build interdisciplinary knowledge around a systems approach. Urban Planet takes an integrative look...

The multi-actor nature of urban sustainability transitions challenges existing social fabrics and local governance settings, and raises questions about who takes decisions, with which agenda and to what end. It demands close attention to who are actors involved in transition processes and what are the implications for (changing) roles, responsibili...

This is a unique book that provides rich knowledge on how to understand and actively contribute to urban sustainability transitions. The book combines theoretical frameworks and tools with practical experiences on transition management as a framework that supports urban planning and governance towards sustainability. The book offers the opportunity...

This paper argues that there is currently a need for new theory on transformative social innovation that is able to provide empowering insights to practice, especially in terms of how social innovation interacts with transformative change processes. It identifies three ‘pitfalls’ that such theory-building needs to confront, and presents middle-rang...

This editorial introduces the special feature on the role of game-changers, broadly conceptualized as macro-trends that change the “rules of the game,” in processes of transformative social innovation. First, the key concepts are introduced together with the academic workshop that brought together 25 scholars, from across a wide range of discipline...

An updated version of this working paper has been published in the 'Research Policy' journal (2020). Pel, B., Haxeltine, A., Avelino, F., Dumitru, A., Kemp, R., Bauler, T., Kunze, I., Dorland, J., Wittmayer, W. & Jørgensen, M. S. (2020), Towards a theory of Transformative Social Innovation: a relational framework and 12 propositions, Research Pol...

In recent years, there have been substantial efforts towards theory-building and conceptual clarification in social innovation (SI) research further contributing to its consolidation as a research field. Taking a different angle, this special issue aims to contribute to such consolidation by introducing greater reflexivity about the underlying meth...

The article describes the field of sustainability transitions research, which emerged in the past two decades in the context of a growing scientific and public interest in large-scale societal transformation toward sustainability. We describe how different scientific approaches and methodological positions explore diverse types of transitions and p...

This paper conceptualizes power and empowerment in the context of sustainability transitions and transition governance. The field of transition studies has been critically interrogated for undermining the role of power, which has inspired various endeavours to theorize power and agency in transitions. This paper presents the POwer-IN-Transition fra...

Social innovation is increasingly endorsed for its potentials towards addressing societal challenges of sustainability, social inclusion and democratization. Critical scholars and practitioners have raised attention however to the many ways in which SI silently reproduces rather than transforms dominant institutions. This contribution seeks to clar...

This deliverable is the synthesis report of work package 5 ‘Cases and Evidence – Meta analysis’. It presents the results of the meta-analysis of TSI propositions through the Critical Turning Points database. This database contains 65 local manifestations of transnational social innovation networks in 28 different countries, and almost 400 in-depth...

This article shows opportunities and intricacies of transition management as a facilitated empowerment process that seeks to empower ‘frontrunners’ to (re-)define and take up roles in contributing to sustainability transitions. In the context of ‘retreating’ welfare states there is an increasing focus on ‘empowering’ civil society actors to take ov...

This paper reviews criticisms of sustainability transition studies, using transition management (TM) as a case study. While these criticisms have yielded theoretical progress, underlying epistemological issues remain. Contrasting the TM approach to complexity with other more deconstructive views on complexity, it becomes clear that some criticisms...

Neoliberalism is a powerful narrative that has shaped processes of urban economic development across the globe. This paper reports on four nascent ‘new economic’ narratives which represent fundamentally different imaginaries of the urban economy. Experiments informed by these narratives challenge the dominant neoliberal logic in four key dimensions...

Continuing economic turbulence has fuelled debates about social and political reform as much as it has stimulated actions and initiatives aimed at a more fundamental transition of dominant economic systems. This paper takes a transition perspective to explore, from a Western European viewpoint, how the economic crisis is actually viewed through a v...

This is a working paper from the early stages of the TRANSIT project. More recent accounts are Avelino, F., Wittmayer, J. M., Pel, B., Weaver, P., Dumitru, A., Haxeltine, A., ... & O'Riordan, T. (2019). Transformative social innovation and (dis) empowerment. Technological Forecasting and Social Change, 145, 195-206. Pel, B., Haxeltine, A., Aveli...

To date, the field of transition research lacks a suitable vocabulary to analyse the (changing) interactions and relations of actors as part of a sustainability transition. This article addresses this knowledge gap by exploring the potential of the concept of ‘roles’ from social interaction research. The role concept is operationalized for transiti...

In his book The Great Transformation (1944), Karl Polanyi introduced the concept of a double movement in society. The first movement is towards marketization: the spread of market thinking and market-based forms of allocation throughout society, driven by international trade and naturalist ideas of competition and utilitarianism. The second movemen...

Social innovation is increasingly believed to have a great potential for addressing persistent societal challenges such as sustainability, social inclusion, democratization and deprivation. We understand transformative social innovation (TSI) as social innovation that is aimed to challenge, alter, replace or provide alternatives to dominant institu...

Since its emergence as a theory of sustainability transformation, transitions theory has started to gain currency with both policymakers and researchers. As transitions approaches become established in research and policy, a process of institutionalization can be witnessed. Yet notwithstanding this mainstreaming, transitions theory continues to be...

This paper contributes to understanding transition politics by conceptualizing (shifting) power relations between actors in sustainability transitions. The authors introduce a Multi-actor Perspective as a heuristic framework for specifying (shifting) power relations between different categories of actors at different levels of aggregation. First, a...

Community energy is emerging as an intriguing new way of organizing the energy system. It fits very well to discourses on sustainability, but also to more neo-liberal ideas of self-reliance and independence. At the same time, its development challenges existing (energy) structures and raises questions about the (self-) governance of community energ...

European societies are faced with amalgamated crises: ecological degradation and loss of ecosystem functions, trembling welfare systems that retreat from providing services needed to fulfill basic societal needs and maintain social security, and the resurfacing of dichotomies in societies as effects of gentrification and fear of loss and change. In...

In this paper, seven researchers reflect on the journeys their research projects have taken when they engage with and synthesize complex problems. These journeys embody an adaptive approach to tackling problems characterized by their interconnectedness and emergence, and that transcend traditional units of analysis such as ecosystems. In this paper...

Community energy is emerging as an intriguing new way of organizing the energy system. It fits very well to discourses on sustainability, but also to more neo-liberal ideas of self-reliance and independence. At the same time, its development challenges existing (energy) structures and raises questions about the (self-) governance of community energ...

Community owned renewable energy initiatives are the emergent and self-organized arrangements where communities become both producers and suppliers of energy. Cases of community energy developments form Texel (Netherlands), and Undy and Urgha (UK) are the empirical grounds that demonstrate this capacity. As highly desirable community owned renewabl...

This paper takes up the challenge of providing a conceptual power framework to be used in the context of sustainability research. First, challenges of sustainability research are discussed by focusing specifically on recent insights from Integrated Sustainability Assessment (ISA), and on that basis some requirements for concepts to be used in susta...

In this article we present a model for transforming a car-based mobility system into a more sustainable one. It is based on visions of sustainable mobility, the use of strategic experiments and special programmes for system innovation, to complement transport policies such as road pricing, emission standards and so on. The article does three things...

This is a book about power and transformative change. It explores how groups of people who are trying to transform the mobility system are affected by notions of change and power, and how they deal with the dilemmas of power. Academic literature on power and transitions offers concepts to grasp phenomena in practice. And visa versa, observing these...

This article conceptualizes power in the context of long-term process of structural change. First, it discusses the field of transition studies, which deals with processes of structural change in societal systems on the basis of certain presumptions about power relations, but still lacks an explicit conceptualization of power. Then the article disc...

This article explores the relation between empowerment and long-term policy design. More specifically, it studies the empowerment aspect of a specific long-term policy design, transition management (TM), both theoretically and empirically. First, the respective bodies of literature on empowerment and TM are synthesized and four theoretically (dis)e...

In this experimental research area development - the foreseeable core concept in Dutch spatial planning at the time of writing - is linked to societal transitions. It does this for the Rotterdam-Antwerp corridor, or Corazone. The authors research how development towards sustainable systems can be linked to spatial planning. Transitions in agricultu...

Dit rapport is het resultaat van de activiteiten van de ‘Transitie arena Ruimtelijke Orde Zuidvleugel’ gericht op het perspectief ‘mobiliteit’. Eerder verscheen het rapport ‘Systeem Ruimtelijke Orde (vanuit Transitieperspectief)’ dat resultaten van de arena beschreef vanuit het perspectief ‘ruimtelijke ordening’. Onder leiding van onderzoekers van...

This paper offers an empirical account of how transition management is applied in practice in the Dutch transport sector. More specifically it discusses the Dutch programme Transumo (which is an abbreviation for TRANsition to SUstainable MObility). Besides a general account of Transumo, a more context-specific analysis is given of one of the 22 Tra...