Reading persistence: Social inertia as a cross-disciplinary framework for sustainability transformation

Abstract Sustainability research routinely treats inertia as the obstacle that explains why interventions fail to embed in everyday life. This Perspective argues that what is labelled as inertia is often patterned persistence—signal rather than noise—carrying moral commitments, ecological knowledge and potentially protective strategies. I define social inertia (SI) as the patterned continuation of social trajectories shaped by historical pathways, embodied routines, institutional arrangements and cultural attachments, and propose a five-part typology (institutional, embodied, narrative, ritual and infrapolitical) giving the concept analytical depth beyond the mechanistic vocabularies of lock-in, regime stability and behavioural habit. A methodological orientation drawn from the humanities and interpretive social sciences—archival reading against the grain, oral history, and Future Design—reads SI across past, present and imagined-future registers. The reconceptualisation reframes the field’s diagnostic starting point: not “why does change fail” but what the patterning of continuity reveals about the lives interventions seek to alter.