Transitions research recognizes that current environmental problems represent formidable societal challenges, whose solution requires deep structural changes in key areas of human activity, but that existing systems tend to be very difficult to ‘dislodge’ because they are stabilized by various lock-in processes that lead to path dependent developments and ‘entrapment’. In recent years, research at UEA has been developing tools for the assessment of sustainability transitions, developing theory, and conducting empirical research on ‘grassroots’ innovations (in a range of empirical domains including housing, food, complementary currencies, community energy projects, and transport). The current focus of research is on the role of culture, civil society and social movements in transition processes.
There is widespread agreement that the affluent lifestyles of the developed countries must shift towards more sustainable forms of consumption. Improving production technologies alone is unlikely to meet the sustainability challenge: attention must turn to the factors which influence and might transform consumption (demand) at the individual, household and community level. With this perspective in mind, our research includes one strand studying a range of initiatives which aim to produce more sustainable behaviours among individual consumers. A second strand of our work explores what this alternative vision might entail, and how it could be enacted by individuals and communities in search of more sustainable lifestyles.
Our research on innovation understands innovation processes as socially embedded and subject to overall systemic societal relations and constraints. This area of work extends beyond primarily technological conceptions of the innovation process to encompass a diversity of forms of innovation including social, policy, democratic and grassroots innovation.
In many cases this involves studying the way in which publics and civil society actors are actively involved in innovation processes. A particular strength of our research is that we adopt a range of different theoretical lenses to study innovations processes, and we are at the forefront of developing new approaches that are better suited to studying contemporary innovation processes in the context of societal challenges.
We conduct world-leading research on the social and political dimensions of environment and sustainability issues. 3S is based in the School of Environmental Sciences, University of East Anglia, UK.
