Institutional conditions for governments working on sustainability transitions

Abstract

The literature on societal transitions offers many policy recommendations. The implicit assumption is that the civil servants can follow these recommendations and design policies to accelerate transitions. This article shows that governmental transformation is needed to enable civil servants to act upon these, which is currently far from straightforward due to institutional constraints. We used a research-by-design approach with four design groups of civil servants working on transitions within a Dutch ministry. By studying how they interacted and designed alternative scenarios for resolving real-life, deeply rooted institutional constraints, we identified twelve preliminary institutional conditions for a government working on sustainability transitions. The institutional conditions relate to working with uncertainty, implementing operational management, implementing interdependent stewardship, and detaching from the current system.