Multiple levels of agency in socio-technical transitions – Mnemonic agents and the constitution of group identities

Several transition scholars criticize the conceptualization of agency in socio-technical frameworks as rather static. They argue that it ignores the multiple roles people fulfil in everyday life and the multiple levels on which behavioural agency occurs. Accounting for such dynamics is imperative, so these scholars argue, to include a broader variety of social groups in sustainability transitions. This article accounts for the multiple levels on which mnemonic agency occurs. It does so by exploring how the multiple roles that authors of women's guides identified with in the Dutch energy transition to gas and electricity influenced the historical narratives on technological development they constructed. More particularly, the article explores how in their roles as authors, women's organization members and political current supporters women's guide authors ‘mnemonically imagined’ coherent narratives that constituted group identities. The article shows that authors of women's guides embedded their historical narratives within the imagined future and memory scales that the women's organization and political current they identified with prescribed. Identification with a political current guided the perception of the future history progressed towards. Identification with a women's organization drew the authors towards historical precedents on particular societal scales. Within the cadres of their political current and women's organization identities, the women's guide authors mobilized particular memories to construct narratives that adhered to their particular interest. The article concludes that in the studied transition, author agency, women's organization agency and political current agency simultaneously influenced the construction of historical narratives in a layered fashion. • Studies the multiple levels of mnemonic agency to increase understanding of identity formation. • Uses mnemonic imagination as concept to study the interplay between individual and collective identities. • Adopts text mining to study the construction of transformative narratives. • Calls for research on mnemonic agency in contemporary sustainability transitions to enhance inclusivity.