Rescaling Sustainability Transitions
Description
This Open Access book explores sustainability transitions with a focus on their influence on the relationships between cores and peripheries, the rural and the urban, and the large and the small-scale. The societal changes induced by sustainability transitions are expected to assemble as a variegated and heterogeneous process reproduced by different spatial contexts and scales. Hence, the practical solutions and impacts of processes framed as sustainability transitions are expected to vary between different localities in terms of their natural, material, or human resources, the heritage of the development, their power and market relations, virtual and physical connections as well as shifting individual rationalities - within and across certain socio-economic spaces. To highlight these socio-spatial processes, their alignments, frictions and contradictions for sustainability transitions, this book and its contributions call for an increased engagement in the scalar aspects of sustainability transitions and their governance. The authors argue that rescaling follows from two observations on the extant literature concerning sustainability transitions. Firstly there is a call for a stronger engagement of sustainability transitions research with questions of place and relocalization practices, their embedded power relations, but also questions on small-scale trajectories for the territorial and economic materializations in terms of production and market reach as an alternative to the large-scale dominance of resource exploitation and use. Secondly there is a call for increased attention to the relational processes and ontological framing that reproduce mobilities and scalar shifts in governance arrangements.
More details
Persons
Maija Halonen is a University Lecturer at the Department of Geographical and Historical Studies at the University of Eastern Finland.
Moritz Albrecht is an Associate Professor in Environmental Political Geography at the Department of Geographical and Historical Studies, University of Eastern Finland.
Irene Kuhmonen is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the School of Business and Economics, University of Jyväskylä.
Content
Chapter 1. Introduction to rescaling sustainability transitions ( Maija Halonen, Moritz Albrecht & Irene Kuhmonen ).- Part I: National rescaling.- Chapter 2. (Re)Territorialising policy narratives and their role for novel bioeconomy sectors in the EU ( Moritz Albrecht & Oliver Klein ).- Chapter 3. Tourism and sustainability transitions: A scalar analysis of agency in Costa Rica ( Laura Sariego-Kluge and Diana Morales ).- Chapter 4. Energy transition as space making: Rescaling of accelerated transformations in the context of Estonia ( Tarmo Pikner ).- Chapter 5. Rescaling Renewable Energy Communities in Portugal: Expert imaginaries of business-as-usual, the empowered citizen and the smart network ( Ross Wallace and Susana Batel ).- Chapter 6. From centralisation to decentralisation? Transition visions of circular bioeconomy in rural Finland ( Irene Kuhmonen, Tuomas Kuhmonen & Annukka Näyhä ).- Chapter 7. Grounded Sustainability Transitions: Unfolding controversy towards a policy implementation in Colombia ( Germán A. Quimbayo Ruiz ).- Part II : Regional rescaling.- Chapter 8. Exploring 'Just' Transitions in Regional Aotearoa New Zealand: Cases of Taranaki and Southland ( Sean Connelly, Etienne Nel & Danielle Lomas ).- Chapter 9. isaggregating sustainable transitions through power and governance arrangements in municipal enterprises: A case study of the Canmore Community Housing Corporation ( Laura Ryser, Sean Markey, Greg Halseth, Martin Mateus & Lars Hallstrom ).- Chapter 10. From Lignite Regions to Transition Labs. Rethinking Regional Politics of Lignite from the Perspective of the "Politics of Scale" ( Sören Becker & Matthias Naumann ).- Chapter 11. South Africa's sustainability transition: the case of the Mpumalanga province and its coal-dependent communities ( Etienne Nel and Lochner Marais ).- Chapter 12. Sustainability transition in peripheral small-scale forest industries: Case studies from Finland and Sweden ( Maija Halonen & Linda Lundmark ).