New Departures—Or a Spanner in the Works? Exploring Narratives of Impact-Driven Sustainability Research

Abstract

This article analyses the narratives of impact-driven transition research in the field of sustainability studies. It reconstructs patterns of narrations at a discourse level. Departing from the understanding that narrating is a fundamental mode of communication and education, this contribution is ultimately driven by the commitment to understand how narrativity can be improved in order to reach more effective rhetoric for sustainability research. The article starts by describing the dilemma sustainability researchers might find themselves in regarding their position vis-à-vis society and politics. This dilemma seems to shape the narratives researchers use for describing their work. After conceptualizing narratives on a structural level, findings from a comprehensive qualitative interview study are presented and discussed. We find that sustainability researchers can be clustered in five different types, depending on their affinity or distance to real-world sustainability processes, their propensity to either incremental reforms or transformative change and the relationship between environmental and social concerns in the context of the sustainability concept. Furthermore, we find that critical-constructive transformative research encounters challenges when narrating about its position vis-à-vis society and policy-making in the process of formulating goals and working towards them. We identified a tension between leaning stronger either towards independent, critical goal formulation or towards an engagement with actual political processes. Maintaining the ability to change roles between the process-involved and the process-observing sustainability researcher might be a promising way out for those dedicated to workings towards sustainability transitions.

Goodbye Expert-Based Policy Advice? Challenges in Advising Governmental Institutions in Times of Transformation

“…In the SR community, the coexistence of modernist and reflexive logics takes different forms depending on the organization. Indeed, while the ideal of transformative research is widely embraced among sustainability researchers, the perspectives and narratives that transformative and solutions-oriented research entails strongly differ [10,12]. Some of the researchers still adhere to the ideal of "speaking truth to power", whereas others see themselves more as "change agents".…”

“…The growing awareness of planetary boundaries and the associated challenge of a global transformation towards sustainability have increased the demand for anticipatory and reflexive knowledge to support decision making around issues of high uncertainty [9]. Science, especially in the field of sustainability, is confronted with the new role of not only researching societal transformation, but actively supporting and driving it forward [10][11][12]. It has been long known that this has led to a growing scientization of politics and politicization of science [1,13].…”

Narratives of urban mobility in Germany: on the threshold of a departure from the car-centered city?

“…I argue that in concrete utterances such as verbal speeches or written texts, whenever a deed is described, this concrete textual section contains a narrative. Following previous published work (G€ urtler and Rivera 2019;Schmidt and Rivera 2020), I call these narratives on the text level "micro-narratives" and assume that these micro-narratives aggregate to form cross-text narratives that structure the discourse. Narratives can be assessed using different methodological approaches such as plot analysis based on Hayden White's (1975) Metahistory and actant analysis following semiotician Algirdas Greimas' (1983) work on the structures of meaning.…”

“…Narratives can be assessed using different methodological approaches such as plot analysis based on Hayden White's (1975) Metahistory and actant analysis following semiotician Algirdas Greimas' (1983) work on the structures of meaning. In the context of the study of SD discourses, the "pentadic approach" based on Kenneth Burke's (1969Burke's ( , 1978 writings has been developed to analyze narratives (Rivera and Nanz 2018;G€ urtler and Rivera 2019). A pentad is a structure of five elements that can potentially underlie a micro-narrative: a character ("agent"), their action ("act"), the means they employ ("agency"), their aim ("purpose") and the action's context ("scene").…”

A Collaborative Transformation beyond Coal and Cars? Co-Creation and Corporatism in the German Energy and Mobility Transitions

“…This addresses a blind spot in sustainability studies primarily addressing large-scale changes. While there have been many proposals concerning "grand transformations" [43][44][45][46] and multilevel transitions [47,48] within the sustainability literature, there has been little distinction made between the more incremental kinds of change that are much more likely to occur in consensus-oriented polities such as Germany. Other concepts rightly emphasize the importance of conflict and discussion [49,50], but rarely elaborate on the co-existence and interdependence of diverse arenas of conflicts and collaborations [39,51,52].…”