Transitions governance: Towards a new governance paradigm

This paper presents a framework for governance in the context of large scale and long term societal change (transitions). We argue that existing theories of governance offer interesting descriptive insights for such a framework, but do not present innovative prescriptive ideas for governance of transitions. In this paper we distill and abstract the basic and more generic notions in a number of key governance fields, and try to relate these to emerging theory on transitions and their governance. More specific, we build upon the interactive governance paradigm and link it to transition thinking and transition management. Our paper thus seeks to outline the contours of transitions governance and develop two operational links in the form of transition governance frameworks for detecting the societal potential for system’s change and for orienting the societal system towards transitions.