Transition pathways: Exploring sustainable futures

As we face a range of sustainability challenges and growing societal complexity, there is both a pressing need and a unique opportunity to drive systemic, positive change. Achieving sustainability involves making informed decisions in the face of uncertainty and aligning diverse stakeholders toward a common direction. But how can we explore and guide such transformations?

Here, transition pathways can provide a strong framework for this purpose, enabling actors to engage in collective visioning and decision-making processes. Transition pathways have garnered significant attention as a means to address the pressing need for systemic change toward a more sustainable future. These pathways serve as strategic tools designed to facilitate the collective envisioning and realisation of desired future states through systemic change.

At Ramboll, we recently supported the European Commission DG Environment on the study ‘Transition Pathways in the context of the 8th Environment Action Programme’^[1], providing an overview of the theoretical background and practical use of transition pathways.

This article builds on those findings and examines the role of transition pathways in supporting navigating uncertainty, building consensus, and turning foresight-thinking into actionable strategies.

What are Transition Pathways?

Transition pathways are structured approaches that help organisations and governments envision, plan, and implement systemic change toward sustainability. They operate on two key principles: exploration and collaboration.

First, they have an exploratory nature, and second, they are reflective instruments built through collective discussions, bringing together stakeholders to develop shared visions and ensure commitment to meaningful action. Also, rather than assuming a fixed solution, they enable actors to explore what sustainable futures could look like and what shifts are needed to reach them. This exploration exercise can help to understand different potential outcomes and enable a shared reflection towards change, including the changes needed to unlock such desirable futures.

What can we learn about Transition Pathways?

In practice, there are no defined standards on what transition pathways entail and how they are organised. This lack of definition leads to a range of approaches on how policy actors or other relevant stakeholders develop transition pathways.

Based on the empirical analysis of different cases, our report identifies two main approaches to building transition pathways: (1) the techno-economic approach, and (2) the socio-technical approach. The techno-economic approach is limited to exploring technological options and market trends, using scenario analysis and modelling to guide transition plans without mandating specific technologies. Meanwhile, the socio-technical approach incorporates social and policy issues, offering specific technological and behavioural transition routes, along with commitments and targets for key actors.

How Transition pathways improve future-thinking

Transition pathways involve a set of actions that ultimately contribute to improving future thinking. These actions are the envisioning of a systemic change, the exploration of alternatives, the shared reflection, and the guidance of change.

• Envisioning Systemic Change: Transition pathways are designed to enable systemic change by helping stakeholders imagine and implement change. These tools are vital because they move beyond simply addressing current issues and instead provide methods to envision alternative system adjustments. Such visions enable stakeholders to reflect towards sustainability holistically, including issues such as environmental change, social aspects, and even geopolitical aspects. This breadth ensures that transitions are comprehensive in the aspects that they rethink, and that they build consistency within these different aspects.
• Exploring Alternatives: Unlike traditional roadmaps that focus on a single predefined future, transition pathways allow for the exploration of various potential directions and alternative transition strategies. Envisioning different futures helps in understanding diverse possibilities and outcomes, rather than focusing on one specific path. This also helps stakeholders see their potential roles in shaping these futures. By exploring multiple possible futures, they also help navigate complex and evolving scenarios, and to create critical knowledge in planning for an uncertain future.
• Shared Reflection: Transition pathways promote collective reflection on feasible and desirable futures. They facilitate discussions and deliberations among stakeholders to develop a shared future vision. This shared future is also based on the collective deliberation exercise and the creation of a shared understanding of what are the desired possibilities. Finally, the shared reflection allows to combine the different visions and expertise from stakeholders.
• Guideing Change: Transition pathways can also help to identify the key actions and levers to drive transitions towards such desired futures. In practice, this means to inspire public policy, to guide public and private investments, or to promote shared commitments among stakeholder groups and governments to build transitions. Transition pathways can also divide the transition process into smaller, manageable steps. By visualising these steps, stakeholders can better understand their roles in driving change, making significant changes seem more attainable and therefore reducing complexity.

Using transition pathways helps policymakers to reflect and envision a sustainable future. This is relevant in the context of creating policy strategies or other plans for medium to long-term changes. For example, transition pathways can be developed to reflect on the sectoral transition towards a sustainable economy, the achievement of the sustainability goals, or the development of climate change adaptation strategies. Additionally, transition pathways can help guide public policy by incorporating elements such as shared commitments with stakeholders, along with deadlines, indicators, and the definition of milestones and goals for medium- and long-term planning to monitor the attainment of such commitments.

There are several examples of transition pathways that showcase how this new concept can be integrated in practice to guide policymaking in the medium and long term. The transition pathways of the European Commission DG GROW^[1] that are derived from the revised EU Industrial Strategy offer an example of how the EU industry can transition through shared commitments that go beyond traditional policy planning. These examples can inspire future projects on policy planning towards more ambitious visons of sustainability.

For businesses and public institutions alike, using a transition pathway approach can mean the difference between vague aspirations and a defined vision of the future. Whether it is sectoral transformation, climate adaptation, or achieving the sustainability goals, a defined vision of a desired future enables to articulate better transition strategies and improve policy decisions.

^[1] Transition pathways for European industrial ecosystems. https://single-market-economy.ec.europa.eu/industry/transition-pathways_en