Applied Transition Design for Socio-Ecological Outcomes: Local Movements, Incumbent Systems, and the Need for Agile Weaving

Researchers often seek to enable sustainability transitions by helping new technologies or practices influence and change society in deep and transformative ways. There are inherent tensions in these ambitions, but they remain underexplored in the literature and practical experiences of our encounters with these tensions are similarly underdiscussed. This paper shares reflections and insights from a transdisciplinary project in Australia which explored how a more deliberate and critically reflexive approach to research could be pursued to enable a transition toward an algal bioeconomy. Presenting the project as a case study, we highlight how issues of place, materiality, aesthetics, and history can influence the role of research in socio-technical transitions in subtle and often unacknowledged ways. In the context of a nascent and contested bioeconomic vision for Australia, we contend that there is a need for researchers to challenge themselves with speculative, normative and plausible transition design projects, to build our collective capacity for deliberate and critical engagement in the futures that we pursue, or participate in, through our work. Specific practices that might help are raised and enabling conditions, such as a gap in the structure of Australia’s National Innovation System, are addressed in the discussion. In the face of these needs, challenges and opportunities, we conclude that a ‘systems weaver’ modality can offer clarity, agency and understanding to researchers and practitioners about the potential of their work and their role in systems change.