Enhancing the social acceptance of sustainability transitions: introducing a heuristic, diagnostic, and integrative transition governance framework

Whilst sustainability transitions are key in addressing the triple planetary crisis of climate change, biodiversity loss, and pollution, attempts to implement them are often confronted with protest. Despite a rich body of literature around dynamics of transitions, there exists a knowledge gap on how to address this lack of social acceptance and the political response to date is showing a trend of policy dismantling. Current approaches to understand social acceptance of transitions, and the social acceptability evaluation processes behind them, are fragmented and often normative, rooted in predefined moral foundations and prioritised value orientations. Without an integrative framework that integrates this fragmented knowledge and that allows for the inclusion of societal social acceptability evaluations rather than predefined normative criteria, policy makers lack clear guidance on how to govern transitions in a way that increases their social acceptance, beyond watering down transition objectives. Based on literature reviews and empirical data from the English post-Brexit agricultural transition, this article introduces a heuristic, diagnostic, and integrative framework of social acceptability evaluation dimensions within transition governance to support policy makers in their efforts to implement transitions by focusing on the extrinsic social construction processes through which the social acceptance of sustainability transition efforts is negotiated and it provides researchers with a tool around which to anchor examinations of social acceptability evaluations of sustainability transitions.