Rob Raven

Monash University (Australia)

Strategic Niche Management is one of four foundational frameworks of the field of sustainability transitions. Since its inception in the mid 1990s, the framework has evolved and expanded. Originally inspired by quasi-evolutionary theorising of technological change, SNM has incorporated and contributed to a range of contemporary debates in sustainab...

Transforming critical infrastructure systems, such as water and energy, is crucial to achieving global sustainability and climate change targets in many cities. Whilst experimentation has been studied extensively in urban sustainability scholarships, there have been no large-N cross-sector comparative studies. Existing research is potentially blind...

This introductory textbook with a global scope aims to train students of geography, sustainability, and urban and environmental studies to re-imagine and transform cities to meet climate, biodiversity, and sustainability challenges. A dedicated team of authors critically examine the relationships between nature and urban areas, sharing an inspiring...

Integrative transdisciplinary approaches to watershed management are critical for addressing intersecting social, economic, and ecological processes that shape planetary health outcomes for humans, animals, and ecosystems. These challenges are acute in watersheds like the Citarum River in West Java, Indonesia, which suffers from severe pollution du...

Non-Technical Summary Enabling local adoption of the sustainable development goals (SDGs) is important to accelerate global efforts to achieve sustainable development. However, local governments have plural perspectives on how to engage with the SDGs. In this paper, we identify three perspectives on how to enable local SDGs based on cases of nine l...

Accelerated transitions that enable far-reaching and systemic changes to a more sustainable future are urgently needed to ensure inclusive human development and Earth system stability. Different processes for accelerating transitions have been proposed over the past decade. However, evidence-based guidance on of what these processes are across scie...

This article explores the nature of domestic labour involved in sustainability transitions at the household level, with waste reduction as an exemplar. We draw on national survey data (N = 2717) from Australia, and qualitative data from a participatory action project working with 34 householders on experiments in low waste living. We found low wast...

The concept of circular economy (CE) is proposed to lead humanity toward a sustainable future. Public authorities increasingly build on CE narratives. The progress of private sector actors is key to enable more circular resource flows. Still, the world falls far short from becoming circular and large‐scale implementation of CE in actual problem–sol...

Non-Technical Summary This article takes stock of the 2030 Agenda and focuses on five governance areas. In a nutshell, we see a quite patchy and often primarily symbolic uptake of the global goals. Although some studies highlight individual success stories of actors and institutions to implement the goals, it remains unclear how such cases can be u...

Purpose This case study explores different perspectives on integrating the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in universities to achieve university transformations. This study recognises that university actors think differently about the purpose of universities, hold diverse perspectives on the SDGs, and, thus, prefer specific types of SDG integr...

This paper draws on our ongoing ARC Discovery Project on Tracing the Impact of Urban Experimentation across Water and Energy Domains. We are looking to extend our database to other Australian cities and beyond.

The exploration of urban future storylines of transformative change is subject to socio-political processes rather than a mere, objective envisioning of the desirable city. Approaches in urban imagination and planning processes should thus consider plural perspectives across a range of actors and stakeholders beyond the usual suspects of experts an...

Non-technical summary Accelerated decarbonization of academic conferences is necessary and urgent. Despite the window of opportunity that COVID-19 created for rethinking conferences, there is a risk of slipping back into old habits now that restrictions are lifted. This commentary reports on recent experiences with a unique, sustainable approach to...

Purpose This study aims to explore barriers and pathways to a whole-institution governance of sustainability within the working structures of universities. Design/methodology/approach This paper draws on multi-year interviews and hierarchical structure analysis of ten universities in Canada, the USA, Australia, Hong Kong, South Africa, Brazil, the...

Universities are increasingly engaging with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Appeal for the SDGs is partly based on their double transformation framing: they are seen as enablers of societal transformations and transformations within universities. This article aims to understand how the SDGs influence university transformations. We analyse...

Internationally, rental properties have fewer energy efficiency features than other homes, causing unnecessary carbon emissions and poor health outcomes for tenants. Landlords are the primary decision-makers for energy efficiency retrofitting of rental properties, yet their retrofit behaviour is not well understood. We surveyed 500 small-scale priv...

This article explores the COVID-19 pandemic as an external “shock” that changed household-consumption practices in Melbourne, Australia. We assess national consumption data and retail data for the state of Victoria to show how dramatically consumption patterns shifted during 2020. We then discuss three specific examples of changed consumption pract...

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) call for rapid transformation towards a more sustainable society, particularly for cities and urban areas. There is a wide spectrum of research which could inform the initiation and management of this urban transformation, but these contributions are found in disparate disciplines and academic fields. This s...

Sustainability transitions require changing many behaviours embedded in production and consumption systems. Simultaneously, behavioural public policy is now a significant site of research-policy translation globally. Links between behaviour and system change are underdeveloped in both fields. Systematic review of current transitions literature foun...

Written by an international team of over sixty experts and drawing on over three thousand scientific studies, this is the first comprehensive global assessment of the political impact of the Sustainable Development Goals, which were launched by the United Nations in 2015. It explores in detail the political steering effects of the Sustainable Devel...

In this paper we explore the nature of the emerging purpose ecosystem and its role in transforming and supporting business to help address the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). We argue that interactions among its 'private actors', who share efforts and belief in changing and redefining the purpose and nature of business by advocating broade...

The decline side of transitions is an emerging study, which advances thinking on regime destabilisation, technology decline and phase-out policies. Previous research has predominantly focused on the complete phase out of specific unsustainable technologies as desirable or possible, but it has given less attention to how these technological aspects...

In 2015, the United Nations agreed on 17 Sustainable Development Goals as the central normative framework for sustainable development worldwide. The effectiveness of governing by such broad global goals, however, remains uncertain, and we lack comprehensive meta-studies that assess the political impact of the goals across countries and globally. We...

Energy efficiency in private rental properties is lower than that of owner-occupied homes. As landlords are the primary decision-makers for improving rental properties, understanding their energy efficiency behaviour is critical to improving the uptake of energy efficiency retrofits in the private rental sector. However, little is known about how l...

Transition intermediaries are actors that support socio-technical transition processes by bridging structural deficiencies in a transitioning domain. Previous research has identified what roles transition intermediaries perform and how. However, while transitioning domains are by definition in a state of change, the dynamics of transition intermedi...

Nature-based solutions (NBS) are a promising and innovative approach to address multiple sustainability challenges faced by cities. Yet, NBS are not integrated into mainstream urban development practices. Based on a qualitative comparative case study of Germany, Hungary, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, and the United Kingdom, this study shows how b...

Changing consumer food waste-related behaviours is critical to meeting global targets of halving food loss and waste. This paper presents a food waste reduction intervention trialled in five Australian schools and explores its influence on food provisioning practices, changed behaviours and food waste. Consisting of a mix of educational, skills-bas...

In a world faced with constant and varied sustainability challenges, local communities stand at the forefront of global sustainability efforts. What happens at the local level may affect the larger social and environmental systems. Meanwhile, global environmental impacts are also experienced locally. The current global sustainability agenda, Agenda...

The journal Environmental Innovation and Societal Transitions (EIST) recently celebrated its tenth anniversary. Its development represents a great success, contributing substantially to the consolidation and maturation of the research field of sustainability transitions. However, being content with past successes will not be sufficient for tackling...

Sustainability challenges require experimenting with various types of sustainability innovations. Local and regional context conditions influence their diffusion. Our research question is: what are pathways for the transfer of sustainability innovations to other locations, and how do local and regional conditions enable this transfer? We use the no...

Data governance is an emerging field of study concerned with how a range of actors can successfully manage data assets according to rules of engagement, decision rights, and accountabilities. Urban studies scholarship has continued to demonstrate and criticize lack of community engagement in smart city development and urban data governance projects...

This report recognises that Australia’s heavy reliance on jobs and economic activities in carbon-based energy systems and industries means a transition to low carbon will have ripple effects across multiple spheres of Australian society. The report addresses these unique challenges and suggests key principles that government, industry and househol...

Background To advance active transport, robust policy-relevant evidence is needed to understand how to change behaviour and to support decision-making by policy makers and practitioners. Currently, however, priority research questions that are most critical for advancing active transport have not been identified. To this end, we aimed to inform an...

Living labs have emerged as a form of strategic urban experimentation in sustainability transitions governance among policy makers and researchers. Limited attention has been given to the various challenges and dilemmas when doing LLs in relation to enabling urban transitions. This paper unpacks 16 challenges and dilemmas that arise for different a...

Urban transitions and transformations research fosters a dialogue between sustainability transitions theory an inter- and transdisciplinary research on urban change. As a field, urban transitions and transformations research encompasses plural analytical and conceptual perspectives. In doing so, this field opens up sustainability transitions resear...

This editorial introduces a special issue with 27 short viewpoints about future research on transition studies, to commemorate the 10th anniversary of this journal.

Scholars have proposed university models for creating a sustainable future in response to mounting calls for universities to rethink their roles in society. These university models include the Human Development University, the Developmental University, the Post-Developmental University, and the Transformative University. Through a framing analysis,...

In policy and practice, urban Nature-Based Solutions (NBS) are considered promising innovations for sustainable urban transformation. NBS are interventions that use nature to address multiple sustainability challenges simultaneously. As such, they present a novel perspective on urban land use and development. Yet their current uptake into urban dev...

This paper explores conceptualisations of households in sustainability transitions. Existing literature in the field has only engaged with households in a limited and fragmented way, despite the role of households in resource use, shaping social innovation and as a target of environmental policies. The paper asks: how are households conceptualised...

The inability of global governments to meaningfully progress sustainable development over the past three decades is deeply concerning. AI is increasingly framed as a solution for achieving such outcomes, sometimes uncritically. We argue that: 1) for AI to improve public decision-making, the conditions and factors influencing public decisions must b...

Sustainability transitions require changing many behaviours embedded in production and consumption systems. Simultaneously, behavioural public policy is now a significant site of research-policy translation globally. Links between behaviour and system change are underdeveloped in both fields. Systematic review of current transitions literature foun...

Changing the household food waste related behaviours of consumers vital to the sustainable transformation of the global food system. This study utilised a video-elicitation methodology to explore the different factors that influence the food provisioning practices of the household dietary gatekeeper from a multi-level perspective, and to consider t...

A 3-month feasibility assessment was conducted to determine the viability of leveraging Bayesian networks to prioritise policy interventions designed to improve water quality in Port Phillip Bay (Australia). Bayesian networks (BN) are a promising approach in the field of artificial intelligence (AI), and were applied here to provide decision supp...

Energy efficiency of privately rented homes is poorer than that of owner-occupied properties in many countries across Europe, North America and Australasia. Small-scale private landlords are the key decision makers for energy efficiency improvements for most rental properties. These landlords’ energy efficiency retrofit decisions are poorly underst...

Urban living labs have emerged as spatially embedded arenas for governing urban transformation, where heterogenous actor configurations experiment with new practices, institutions, and infrastructures. This article observes a nascent shift towards experimentation at the precinct scale and responds to a need to further investigate relevant processes...

Children’s participation in urban planning impacts communities. A policy environment supports their participation, yet this is far from mainstream, particularly in areas of greatest vulnerability. This literature review demonstrates what we do and don’t know about barriers and enablers to children’s participation in urban planning. We identify key...

Transportation systems are transitioning to e-mobility, but scholars and policymakers are struggling to understand how to accomplish this transition effectively. In response, we draw on the technological innovation systems perspective and the unified theory of acceptance and use of technology to develop a theory-guided and entity-based simulation m...

A transformation of the food system will require action and changes in decision making from individuals across the entire food system. This paper synthesises the literature and develops a framework for analysing the factors which influence decision making for sustainable food practices, with a focus on two key actors: primary producers and consumer...

With this commentary, we share our reflections at the end of a five-year interdisciplinary research project (from 2016 to 2020) on cycling innovations in living labs across the Netherlands. The commentary is the product of a collective writing effort of the researchers. It combines reflections on both the content of our research project (cycling th...

The diversity of local conditions across regions has led to numerous challenges and opportunities for the implementation of global sustainability frameworks such as the Sustainable Development Goals. A grassroots transformative change led by local communities, cities, and businesses can offer a promising approach for achieving sustainability, tailo...

Transitions are processes of major change and often come with conflict. There has been limited attention for the complex and multi-dimensional nature of conflict and its relation to trans-formative change. To capture this complexity, we use the case of ridesharing in Indonesia and the dynamics of conflict that accompany the emergence of digital inn...

Changing the everyday food-related behaviours of consumers is a critical part of tackling the global food waste challenge. Comprehensive frameworks of household food waste and consumer behavior are needed to guide the development of targeted interventions and future research agendas. This study systematically reviews food waste and behaviour studie...

Bike sharing has the potential to contribute to more sustainable urban mobility. Companies providing this service need to generate legitimacy for their venture when entering new cities. They may have to change formal and informal institutions in cities they want to operate. In this paper we explore how and why companies’ institutional strategies di...

Current sustainability challenges call for transitions in locked-in socio-technical systems. The governance of transitions often remains limited to the cultivation of sustainable 'niche' innovations, however. This paper explores how to handle transitions directionality, i.e. the diversity of possible socio-technical development paths. It reaches be...

Sustainability transitions in energy, transport or agro-food systems are needed to tackle grand sustainability challenges. Due to the urgency of these challenges, transitions need to accelerate and widen in scope, which, in some cases, is already happening. This shift in gear, however, comes with a series of 'acceleration challenges', including who...

This paper studies the performativity of smart mobility expectations in envisioning urban futures. Smart mobility, or ICT-enabled transport services, are increasingly considered a necessary ingredient for sustainability transitions in cities. Expectations of smart mobility’s contribution to such a transition are constituted by a strong belief in th...

Transitions literature regards technologies as critical components in shifting systems towards sustainability, which has informed the development of the technology-oriented Technological Innovation System (TIS) framework. The emerging discourse on nature-based solutions (NBS) – multifunctional nature-integrated spatial planning and design innovatio...

Literature on sustainability transitions advocates the institutionalisation of niche innovations and assigns an important role for institutional work in this respect. Previous work has conceptually and empirically substantiated a range of strategies that institutional entrepreneurs perform. However, little is known about how institutional entrepren...

The private sector arguably plays a critical role in addressing the challenges of the Anthropocene and providing potential solutions to achieve the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. Recently, a myriad of new actors in the form of intermediaries, initiatives and organisations have started driving wider systems change by advocating and ad...

This introduction reviews analysis of the dynamics of Technological Innovation Systems and introduces four papers that extend the analysis of dynamic processes in TIS. All four papers employ a system analysis for explaining TIS dynamics: Walrave & Raven and Markard consider the dynamics of the whole TIS. Musiolik et al. and Kieft et al. consider in...

Cities are critical places for the emergence of sustainability transitions. The early phases of transition are often characterised by experimentation. Socio-spatial conditions, such as local policy, governance networks, localised learning and funding structures, are known to influence experimentation, yet there is little empirical knowledge on how...

Low carbon transitions of urban energy systems have been on urban research and policy agendas for several years now. While the spatialities of infrastructure transitions have been widely discussed, their temporalities have attracted much less attention. This is surprising, since the transition of urban infrastructures in the course of system integr...