Exploring the governance and politics of transformations towards sustainability

•'Transformations towards sustainability' are increasingly discussed and debated.•Governance and politics are central to understanding and analysing transformations.•We critically survey four prominent conceptual approaches to transformations.•We reflect on these approaches through the lens of the 'Earth System Governance' framework.•We identify rich existing insights as well as research challenges and opportunities.

The notion of 'transformations towards sustainability' takes an increasingly central position in global sustainability research and policy discourse in recent years. Governance and politics are central to understanding and analysing transformations towards sustainability. However, despite receiving growing attention in recent years, the governance and politics aspects of transformations remain arguably under-developed in the global sustainability literature. A variety of conceptual approaches have been developed to understand and analyse societal transition or transformation processes, including: socio-technical transitions, social-ecological systems, sustainability pathways, and transformative adaptation. This paper critically surveys these four approaches, and reflects on them through the lens of the Earth System Governance framework (Biermann et al., 2009). This contributes to appreciating existing insights on transformations, and to identifying key research challenges and opportunities. Overall, the paper brings together diverse perspectives, that have so far remained largely fragmented, in order to strengthen the foundation for future research on transformations towards sustainability.