Conceptualizing the relationship between industrial transformation and accelerating sustainability transitions: A multi-sectoral perspective

Abstract

The acceleration of sustainability transitions increasingly hinges on industrial transformation, i.e., structural changes in the sectors that produce, use, and support low-carbon technologies. Such changes shape the pace and direction of transitions by affecting the availability of critical inputs—from manufacturing capacity to materials for batteries, transformers, or solar PV—and by creating new opportunities for industrial value creation. Yet current transition studies frameworks offer only partial views of these dynamics. The MLP whole-systems perspective highlights knock-on effects arising from widespread technology diffusion, while the technological innovation system (TIS) approach examines the upscaling of technology value chains. Because these perspectives are typically discussed separately, they provide limited insight into how industrial transformation and system transitions co-evolve. Drawing on evolutionary economics, we integrate these views into a multi-sectoral perspective that distinguishes between service value chains and technology value chains and conceptualizes how they interact in transitions. We assess and refine this framework through a systematic review of 80 empirical studies. The review confirms the usefulness of the perspective and identifies nine key processes that shape multi-sectoral dynamics. We distill five broader insights for transition studies, including the importance of sectoral overlaps, meta-regime shifts, distributed incumbency, spatially uneven industrial opportunities, and the evolving sectoral scope of transitions. These insights enable more granular analysis of how transitions unfold across interconnected sectors and underscore the need for integrated analytical tools and policy approaches that can more accurately interpret and respond to inter-sectoral dynamics in accelerating transitions.