Developing Policy Pathways: Redesigning Transition Arenas for Mid-range Planning

Abstract

Sustainability transitions require new policy pathways that significantly reduce the environmental impacts caused by, for example, energy production, mobility and food production. Transition management (TM) is one of the approaches aiming at the creation of new ways to govern transitions. It uses transitions arenas (TA) as a key process and platform where new policy pathways are created in collaboration with multiple (frontrunner) stakeholders. TM’s ambitious and demanding agenda is not easy to implement. There is a continued need for testing and developing new ways of carrying out its key processes. We redesigned the TA process in the context of energy system change in Finland by 2030, focusing on interim goals, mid-range change pathways and developing a new notation system that allows participants to directly create the pathways. The resulting renewed TA process results in more specific and detailed mid-range pathways that provide more concreteness to how to implement long-term transition goals. It helps to bridge long-term national visions/strategies and low carbon experiments that are already running. The Finnish TA work created eight ambitious change pathways, pointing towards new and revised policy goals for Finland and identifying specific policy actions. Evaluation of the TA, 6–9 months after its completion underscores that an effective TA needs to be embedded by design in the particular political context that it seeks to influence. It is too early to say to what degree the pathways will be followed in practice but there are positive signs already.

Co-creating transdisciplinary global change research agendas in Finland

“…[6]) these are comparable to the processes of transition arenas in sustainability transitions research (see e.g. [1,36,37]), for example. The novelty in this approach was reaching outside of the academic actors for multi-actor conceptualisation in global change and focusing on a very complex, transdisciplinary, diverse and a large-scale topic, which due to its nature has no single owner or advancer in the Finnish research landscape.…”

The housing aspirations of Australians across the life-course: closing the ‘housing aspirations gap’

“…In urban planning, urban design and social policy, acceptance of integrated research to policy pathways via participatory methods are emerging. These policy development methods are used for urban design planning, participation within system evaluation of how fields or sectors work together, as well as for understanding complex fields of social policy concurrently, and how these affect end users (Hyysalo, Lukkarinen et al 2019;Frantzeskaki, Broto et al 2017;Stoker and Evans 2016;Evans and Terrey 2016). This is understood as a democratisation of policy making and innovation.…”

“…In this way, co-design of policy can be thought of as taking the concept of deliberative development, in which future residents are integrally involved in the visioning and design of their future dwellings (Sharam 2016) and applying this to institutional housing settings, housing governance, housing assistance provision and to a scaledup form of deliberative development in urban precinct and regional participatory policy development. These forms of innovative research to policy practice have foundations in urban design and transitions innovation for sustainable built environment context internationally (Hyysalo, Lukkarinen et al 2019;Frantzeskaki, Broto et al 2017;Stoker and Evans 2016;Evans and Terrey 2016). Understanding the ways residents might engage in participatory policy co-design practice is a direction that stems directly from this research, and may lead to considerable future housing policy innovation if adopted and undertaken openly and with care.…”

Towards Carbon-Neutral Mobility in Finland: Mobility and Life Satisfaction in Day-to-Day Life

“…Considering the pace of the required change toward sustainable mobility, combining technological innovations with demand-side management and acceleration of innovations with sectoral policies, is vital for achieving such change [6,30,37]. It is equally important to phase out unsustainable technologies and practices [38] and start developing new sociotechnical systems [39] and strengthen their social embeddedness [39]. One of the most popular conceptualizations for sustainable mobility is developed by Banister [37].…”