Research on sustainability transitions has expanded rapidly in the last ten years, diversified in terms of topics and geographical applications, and deepened with respect to theories and methods. This article provides an extensive review and an updated research agenda for the field, classified into nine main themes: understanding transitions; power, agency and politics; governing transitions; civil society, culture and social movements; businesses and industries; transitions in practice and everyday life; geography of transitions; ethical aspects; and methodologies. The review shows that the scope of sustainability transitions research has broadened and connections to established disciplines have grown stronger. At the same time, we see that the grand challenges related to sustainability remain unsolved, calling for continued efforts and an acceleration of ongoing transitions. Transition studies can play a key role in this regard by creating new perspectives, approaches and understanding and helping to move society in the direction of sustainability.

This paper addresses interactions between technological innovation systems (TIS) and wider "context structures". While TIS studies have always considered various kinds of contextual influences, we suggest that the TIS framework can be further strengthened by a more elaborated conceptualization of TIS context structures and TIS-context interactions. For that purpose, we identify and discuss four especially important types of context structures: technological, sectoral, geographical and political. For each of these, we provide examples of different ways in which context structures can interact with a focal TIS and how our understanding of TIS dynamics is enhanced by considering them explicitly. Lessons for analysts are given and a research agenda is outlined.

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The challenge of assessing emerging technologies with life cycle assessment (LCA) has been increasingly discussed in the LCA field. In this article, we propose a definition of prospective LCA: An LCA is prospective when the (emerging) technology studied is in an early phase of development (e.g., small-scale production), but the technology is modeled at a future, more-developed phase (e.g., large-scale production). Methodological choices in prospective LCA must be adapted to reflect this goal of assessing environmental impacts of emerging technologies, which deviates from the typical goals of conventional LCA studies. The aim of the article is to provide a number of recommendations for how to conduct such prospective assessments in a relevant manner. The recommendations are based on a detailed review of selected prospective LCA case studies, mainly from the areas of nanomaterials, biomaterials, and energy technologies. We find that it is important to include technology alternatives that are relevant for the future in prospective LCA studies. Predictive scenarios and scenario ranges are two general approaches to prospective inventory modeling of both foreground and background systems. Many different data sources are available for prospective modeling of the foreground system: scientific articles; patents; expert interviews; unpublished experimental data; and process modeling. However, we caution against temporal mismatches between foreground and background systems, and recommend that foreground and background system impacts be reported separately in order to increase the usefulness of the results in other prospective studies. Keywords:case study emerging technology industrial ecology life cycle assessment (LCA) prospective technological changeConflict of interest statement: The authors have no conflict to declare.

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