Institutional conditions for governments working on sustainability transitions

Rik B Braams, Joeri H Wesseling, Albert J Meijer and Marko P Hekkert

Science and Public Policy, 2024, vol. 51, issue 5, 836-849

Abstract: The literature on societal transitions offers many policy recommendations. The implicit assumption is that the civil servants can follow these recommendations and design policies to accelerate transitions. This article shows that governmental transformation is needed to enable civil servants to act upon these, which is currently far from straightforward due to institutional constraints. We used a research-by-design approach with four design groups of civil servants working on transitions within a Dutch ministry. By studying how they interacted and designed alternative scenarios for resolving real-life, deeply rooted institutional constraints, we identified twelve preliminary institutional conditions for a government working on sustainability transitions. The institutional conditions relate to working with uncertainty, implementing operational management, implementing interdependent stewardship, and detaching from the current system.

Keywords: sustainability transitions; government; civil servants; institutional blockades; research-by-design approach (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/scipol/scae028 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oup:scippl:v:51:y:2024:i:5:p:836-849.

Access Statistics for this article

Science and Public Policy is currently edited by Nicoletta Corrocher, Jeong-Dong Lee, Mireille Matt and Nicholas Vonortas

More articles in Science and Public Policy from Oxford University Press
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().