This is the Transition(s) Lab: a platform for understanding and shaping transitions in Aotearoa New Zealand and beyond.
Regular posts will start soon. In the meantime, you can subscribe here to receive content by email as soon as it is published.
This will be an evolving project that adjusts to feedback from subscribers and readers. But to get the ball rolling, this is what I'm thinking...
The focus is transitions – with a particular focus on sustainability transitions, digital transformations and our changing political conditions. Newsletters will be sent by email on a regular basis, with three types of content.
First, some posts will be essays that take a deep-dive into transitions-related topics. Given my own research background, the analysis will lean toward policy analysis and political theory, but in a transdisciplinary spirit that calls upon theory and empirical evidence from across the social sciences and humanities. These essays will be called The Shift and I'll try to publish these at least every month.
Second, some posts will focus on knowledge transfer by distilling empirical and theoretical literature into accessible, readable and decision-useful formats. This will include policy briefings, literature reviews and critical syntheses. These posts will be called The Brief and I'll try to publish these on a semi-regular basis, say, every 2–3 weeks.
Third, some posts will be quick-fire collages of new reports, links, insights, journal articles, charts, and other things that caught my attention. These posts will be called The Pointillist and I'll publish these on an ad hoc basis.
In the long run, there are many ways this platform could evolve: guest authors, co-authors, multimedia, perhaps even crowd-funded policy reports to address gaps in the policy landscape. Once the Transition(s) Lab gathers momentum, I am keen to engage with subscribers about the future strategy for this platform.
With regard to outlook, the starting point for this newsletter is the parting thoughts from my essay in A Careful Revolution, an edited collection on low-emissions transitions published in 2019. I wrote:
a transition that takes care of people along the way would be the most rapid and enduring of all transitions, because it would bring people along with it, reducing the likelihood of revolt and resistance, and creating the popular legitimacy that will sustain its reforms into the future.
At the time of writing, the transition to near-zero emissions faces significant revolt and resistance – in Aotearoa New Zealand and beyond. This might seem cause for despair.
But to echo a point made several years ago by Susanne Moser, the shortcomings of past efforts are weirdly a source of hope, because these prove 'we could do so much better.' We can always improve communications, policies, strategies. We can help people around us to see and feel that their interests are aligned with certain transitions. We can broaden the legitimacy and public acceptability of transitions, so that efforts to obstruct them carry consequences for those who try.
This is the purpose of the Transition(s) Lab: to understand and shape transitions by mobilizing knowledge about human action. It is an effort to articulate some of the many ways we can affect change – as citizens, voters, influencers, consumers, importers, investors, employees, directors, regulators, standard setters, and more.
Sign up to join the conversation.