Towards a thick understanding of sustainability transitions - Linking transition management, capabilities and social practices

•Transition management lacks systems and target knowledge for sustainability transitions.•We enrich it with practice theory and the capability approach.•Practice theory gives a picture of the societal changes to be achieved.•The capability approach includes individuals and offers target knowledge.•The resulting heuristics improves the knowledge base for transition governance.

Scientific activities which are targeted to engage and enact on societal problems - and governance of sustainability transition itself is one such activity - are necessarily prescriptive endeavours, have to recognize the fundamental normativity of sustainable development, need to be based on a thick description of the issues to change, and should embrace the multi-dimensional importance that individuals take in societal change. Societally relevant research on and for sustainability transitions therefore has to produce systems, target, as well as transformative knowledge. The challenges of sustainability transitions require furthermore that the individual and the societal levels have to be linked as to relate individual agency and structural change within the different knowledge types.Taking transition management as a rather obvious starting point to enrich the concept of sustainability transitions, the paper elaborates that its conceptual basis is too thin to address the first two types of knowledge. In its current elaborations, transition management does furthermore not cover individual agency as potential driver of transitions. We therefore suggest complementing transition management approaches with the more descriptive practice theory and the more normative and individualistic capability approach. We suggest a heuristic combination that places individuals back into the study of sustainability transitions.

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