Regenerative sustainability. A relational model of possibilities for the emergence of positive tipping points

Self Cite

A crucial task to accelerate global decarbonisation is to understand how to enable fast, equitable, low-carbon transformations in Coal and Carbon Intensive Regions (CCIRs). In this early literature review we underlined the relevance of the boundary concept of social-ecological tipping points (SETPs) and showed that the research and policy usage of SETPs applied to accelerate structural regional sustainability transformations faces three key challenges: (I) integrating theoretical and empirical contributions from diverse social and ecological sciences, together with complexity theory (II) designing open transdisciplinary assessment processes able to represent multiple qualities of systemic change and enable regionally situated transformative capacities, and (III) moving away from one-directional metaphors of social change, or static or homogeneous conceptions of individual agency and single equilibrium in energy transitions; and instead, focus on understanding the conditions and capacities for the emergence of systemic transformations and regenerative processes across multiple levels and forms of agency. We refer to these complex and place-situated processes as learning to enable regional transformative emergence.

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Social-ecological Tipping Points Towards Sustainabilitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Transformative Emergence: Research Challenges for Enabling Social-ecological Tipping Points Toward Regional Sustainability Transformations

Tàbara,

Mangalagiu,

Frantal

et al. 2024

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The TIPPING+ Project Journey

Tàbara

2024

This chapter introduces and provides the research background of the several contributions of this book. It does so first by briefly reviewing the previous conceptual developments that over the course of two decades eventually led to the EU-funded project TIPPING+. The goal of the project was to improve our understanding of the enabling conditions and complex processes for fast structural sustainable transformations in coal and carbon intensive regions (CCIRs) using the notion of positive tipping points as a boundary concept able to bring together the insights of various social science and interdisciplinary perspectives. The main challenge facing these regions is understood not only as sectoral energy transitioning challenge; but the extent to which multiple socio-economic, political and cultural dimensions for full-systems transformations are taken into account. Second, it presents some of the conceptual and methodological proposals generated by the project and argues for ontological and epistemological diversity and to understand equity and justice as a key drivers and outcomes of positive tipping points. As a research journey, however, the TIPPING+ project did not search for a destination. Instead, it looked for a point of departure, for an opportunity space in which different disciplines, researchers and interests could jointly develop their own ideas and start their own new research ventures.

Confronting Local and Global Tipping Narratives: Green Energy Development in the Arctic and Why Greenland Is Not for Sale

Hansen,

Tàbara

2024

This research addresses a confrontation of narratives usually overlooked in global-local discourses about green energy futures by focusing on the case of Greenland. On the one hand, the call for keeping the vast amounts of Greenland’s fossil fuel deposits in the ground, as one of the most efficient and fastest strategies to limit global GHG emissions and avoid a climate catastrophe -hence preventing a negative global climate tipping point. And on the other, the need to exploit and provide alternative mineral resources for the global green energy transformation – hence enabling a global positive tipping point towards a sustainable development trajectory. For that, we trace the historical local conditions and events that eventually led towards green development trajectory pathways. These include indigenous groups’ opposition to oil drilling in the Arctic waters and more recently, the consideration of alternative resource governance mechanisms in support of a low-carbon transformation. We argue that overcoming such confrontation requires reconciling both Natural Resource Justice with Earth System Justice principles that consider the rights, needs, worldviews, and institutional traditions of local communities. Among them, the impossibility of privately owning land across generations in Greenland stems as a possible example of disruptive tipping intervention on how Western societies could learn to relate to biophysical systems in more sustainable ways to cope with accelerated global environmental change.