Sustainability Transitions: From Niche to Mainstream

"From niche to mainstream" was a guiding metaphor for my colleagues and me on Vivid Picture, a 2004-05 consulting project with California's Roots of Change to develop a vision, initiatives and indicators for a transition to a sustainable food system. Here are the Vivid Picture white papers, including the summary report "The New Mainstream: A Sustainable Food Agenda for California" (pdf).

A literature on niche-to-mainstream transitions is summarized by Alex Haxeltine and Gill Seyfang in "Transitions for the People: Theory and Practice of ‘Transition’ and ‘Resilience’ in the UK’s Transition Movement," a 2009 publication of the Tyndall Center.

In recent years a literature on sustainability transitions has emerged (Rip and Kemp, 1998; Rotmans et al, 2001; Smith et al, 2005; Geels, 2005b; Rotmans 2006; Loorbach 2007), with a number of large-scale research projects in the Netherlands in particular. Drawing explicitly on insights from studies of past socio-technical transitions, it offers both a conceptual framework and nascent management tools for understanding and governing transitions.

The transitions literature develops the notion of socio-technical niches as protected spaces where new social and technical practices can develop. It juxtaposes the niche against a dominant socio-technical regime and has surveyed many empirical examples in an attempt to understand the dynamics of how niches can grow and eventually oust a dominant regime (Geels, 2005a, 2005b; Geels and Schot, 2007). The pro-active creation and management of such niches, with the aim of instigating transitions, has become known as Strategic Niche Management (SNM) (Kemp, Schot and Hoogma, 1998; Schot and Geels, 2008).

The transitions management literature generally deals with niches of technological innovations, developing within market contexts. Extending this concept into the social economy, Seyfang and Smith (2007) propose a model of ‘grassroots innovations’ to describe community-led, value-driven initiatives for sustainability, which respond to local problems and develop innovative socio-economic arrangements as much as (or in preference to) new technologies. Seeing these activities as innovative allows us to consider the scope for the diffusion of such innovations into mainstream society, and learn from existing knowledge about strategic niche management. These grassroots innovations have characteristics, benefits and challenges which are distinct from those normally considered in the niche-management literature, with implications for practice and diffusion.

The benefits of grassroots innovations for sustainable development derive principally from their creation of a space for the development of new ideas and practices, for experimenting with new systems of provision, and for enabling people to express their ‘alternative’ green and socially progressive values, and from the tangible achievement of environmental and social sustainability improvements, albeit on a small scale (Seyfang and Smith, 2007). Conversely, the main challenges faced by grassroots innovations are related to the struggle to maintain a viable sustainable socio- technical space within a wider unsustainable regime. This translates into issues around securing funding, which in turn affects possibilities for institutionalisation and consolidating learning, managing organisational change, and diffusing oppositional ideas into wider society (Seyfang, 2009; Smith, 2006, 2007).

There are three ways in which niches can influence the regime. They can replicate, bringing about aggregative changes through many small initiatives; they can grow in scale and attract more participants and actors; and they can translate their ideas into mainstream settings. This third option is problematic when niches are formed in opposition to the regime, as there is a fundamental clash of values, ideas and practices. This gap can be closed by either the niche adapting to become more accessible to mainstream audiences, or by the regime accommodating niche ideas, perhaps through regulation (Smith, 2007; Seyfang, 2009).

(Hat tip to the Resilience Science article, "Critical Reflections on Resilience Thinking in the Transition Movement.")