Breaking out of sustainability impasses: How to apply frame analysis, reframing and transition theory to global health challenges

We combine frame analysis and transition theory into a thinking tool in sustainability science and analyse three serious and persistent problems in global health subject to sustainability impasses: HIV/AIDS, malaria, and indoor air pollution. Frame analysis identifies how problems are encased by scientific understandings and captured by transition barriers: policy cooptation, techno-institutional lock-in, and knowledge trap. Transition theory locates the transition barriers on a temporal scale and a conceptual level: landscape, regime, and niches. Frame analysis reveals how problems are embedded in particular narratives while reframing stimulates alternative understandings and problem solutions. Boundary work facilitates knowledge integration across units and transition management promotes actor oriented problem resolution. The thinking tool unites critical with problem solving research and ties reframing to analytical and temporal understandings of social change. The aim is dual: to advance methodology while stimulating critical problem solving in the quest for environmental innovations, social justice and sustainability.