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

Tipping points can be observed in individual life trajectories as well as in community arrangements and behaviours, but also in economic and distributional structures; in political, governance and institutional arrangements; in geographical and population dynamics (as those which could be derived from climatic risks, Owen & Wesselbaum, 2020; McLeman, 2017); but also in worldviews and beliefs systems, including conventions and public opinion trends (Galam & Cheon, 2020). Hence acknowledging the diverse interpretations of the notion and usages of tipping points by various social science disciplines is a first step for a robust conceptualisation and use in sustainability transformations research and action.

In psychology, models and theories of cognitive, socio-ecological and systemic processes are key to understanding qualitative change involved in socio-ecological tipping points at individual or community levels. Recent studies in human information processing investigate tipping points as ‘the point at which people begin to perceive noise as signal’ (O’Brien & Klein, 2017), and show asymmetries between individual expectations and the actual moment at which this point is reached (O’Brien, 2020). Going beyond the individual level of analysis, further insights on radical system transformation can be found in socio-ecological psychology, dynamical system approach, and models of change based on critical junctures theory (Liu & Pratto, 2018; Reed & Vallacher, 2020; Uskul & Oishi, 2020). Rooted in general system theory and in cultural and societal psychology, these models stress that interrelationships among elements, sub-systems and systems determine the forms of adaptation to internal and/or external factors. However, and despite the centrality of models of change, psychological studies barely refer to tipping points in energy transition (Otto et al., 2020). Thus, research could fruitfully mobilize insights from other social science fields to better understand psychological tipping points and support the emergence of sustainable development pathways. Individual, social and cultural psychological models of change should be integrated with studies on decarbonization, which use tipping point as an interpretative tool (Schmitz, 2017), for decision making (Cuppen et al., 2015), as a threshold (Strauch, 2020; Weng et al., 2018), or associated with speed and scale in non-linear transformations (Messner, 2015).

In economics, the emphasis lies on the identification, modelling and quantification of possible economic interventions such as investments in disruptive technologies (Berger et al., 2020; Lawrence, 2020; Jaakkola & van der Ploeg, 2019; Bretschger & Schaefer, 2017) and their effects in terms of structural changes in the composition of employment or GDP, competitiveness or in financial assets (Oei et al., 2020; Berger et al., 2020; Bovari et al., 2020; Semieniuk et al., 2020; Tàbara et al., 2018). A main contrast exists between those analyses being made with single equilibrium models (Nordhaus, 2019; Lemoine & Traeger, 2016) seeking an optimal policy response and those models that account for the existence of multiple equilibria (Lamperti et al., 2018). The latter represent the move towards integrating system dynamics and agent-based approaches in future research on the economic determinants of tipping points (Hafner et al., 2020). For instance, an economic tipping point may be quantified or even partly anticipated when the costs of a technology decrease to a level which is able to replace an old one and create the conditions for the energy system to jump into a new enduring state or development dynamics (see also Patt & Lilliestam, 2018). However, many other social, cultural or political factors may contribute to adopting such new trajectory besides costs, as it is the case with electric mobility (Strauch, 2020). In this regard, several econometric methods are capable to detect structural change at macro and regional levels (Berger et al., 2020).

In policy science and governance research, an obvious focus lies on fundamental changes in power dynamics and redistribution, the role of social mobilisation or particular events inducing radical modifications in institutional arrangements bringing about new constitutional regimes or breaking down former ones (Schmitz, 2017; Linnér & Wibeck, 2021). This is the case, for instance, with those new regimes which emerged out of the fall of the Berlin wall, or more recently the attempts to change of the Chilean constitution following the uprising triggered by a relatively small increase in public transport fees (Heiss, 2021; Arias-Loyola, 2021), the failure of such structural reform may be explained due to the lack of previous necessary enabling conditions for transformative change. This line of enquiry also addresses how governance and innovation networks develop within and across time and space to the point that unfold new institutions or forms of durable collaboration or transformative agency (Galaz et al., 2016; Westley & McGowan, 2017). Tipping processes modify the degrees of freedom and the opportunity space for system transformation (Herrfahrdt-Pähle et al., 2020; Folke et al., 2021). That is, either reducing or expanding it. The latter case is when some institutional constraints are removed, or new access to resources, networks or knowledge systems are created and facilitate new forms of innovation and agents’ interaction (Amundsen et al., 2018; Füg & Ibert, 2020; Jaakkola & van der Ploeg, 2019; Lutz et al., 2017; Oei et al., 2020; Wiseman, 2018; Schaffrin & Fohr, 2017). In this guise the notion of transformative governance is of special relevance to map out and identify the different kinds of capacities which may lead to tipping points towards sustainability (Hölscher & Frantzeskaki, 2020).

In inter and transdisciplinary approaches, the insights from social-ecological systems (SES) and resilience research (Folke et al., 2021; Hahn & Nykvist, 2017; Lauerburg et al., 2020) on social and natural systems are combined to understand how they mutually influence or change together. These approaches are usually conceptualized with notions such as the adaptive cycle (Walker et al., 2020) whereby successively repeated periods of stability/conservation, release, reorganization, and exploitation make up the ‘panarchy’ process. There may be tipping points in between each phase, but critical thresholds certainly occur in the release phase, whenever the system loses key societal or environmental components or processes that would otherwise allow reorganization to its original form. Moreover, sustainability transformations research is developing new interpretative lens and metaphors derived from social quantum theory (O’Brien, 2016, 2018, 2021) that can be also related to ideas of tipping points. Following these perspectives, it could be argued that a tipping point would occur when a new consciousness about alternative plausible worlds, qualitative kinds of relationships and realities across personal, political and practical configurations and of the role of individual agency in turning them actionable and meaningful emerge. In this vein, sustainability transformations call for problematising current value systems and worldviews (Berzonsky & Moser, 2017) so profound changes in worldviews can also be interpreted through the perspective of deep leverage points (Davelaar, 2021). Systemic tipping points in culture, education and policy processes are largely dependent on the role played by human information and knowledge systems (HIKS; Tàbara & Chabay, 2013; van der Leeuw & Folke, 2021) and normative values (Horcea-Milcu et al., 2019; Jacobson et al., 2020); and as argued by Nyborg et al. (2016), tipping points can also be understood as the moments in which vicious circles in collective behaviour turn into positive ones, e.g., by a change of social norms and perceptions, which in turn can be induced by deliberate policies or the role of minority groups reaching a critical mass (Centola et al., 2018). Justice in particular is also considered a key driver for sustainability transformations and a crucial component to understand radical shifts in power dynamics regarding gender, ethnicity youth inclusion or the social recognition of disadvantaged groups (Allen et al., 2019; Blythe et al., 2018; Ziervogel et al., 2017) and it is also of especial significance in energy transitions research (Cronin et al., 2021; Doyon, 2019; Patterson et al., 2018; Bouzarovski & Simcock, 2017). And in this regard, justice is both a driver and an outcome of positive tipping points.

When considering deep structural change, different disciplines often portray and refer to very different kinds of systems and of how their dynamic components operate. Even within those disciplines using a ‘systemic approach’ to sustainability transformations (Scoones et al., 2020; Fazey et al., 2017) one can find important contrasts, as it is the case with transition theory (Köhler et al., 2019), resilience and social-ecological systems research (Folke et al., 2021; Moore et al., 2014), coupled natural-human systems (CNHS; Liu et al., 2021) or organisational science (Hestad et al., 2021; Westley et al., 2011) where the use of terms as ‘ecosystems’ can have little to do with what natural scientists refer to. This means that they also tend to emphasize different temporal and spatial scales or conceive the role of social agency in them in different modes.

In addition, the position of the researcher with respect to the systems of reference is not independent of their analyses. Systems are always defined in relational ways and are inevitably influenced by previous socially-constructed conceptual categories. Moreover, systems operate under different logics, agents and complex dynamics (Hestad et al., 2020). Using an open, pluralistic, transdisciplinary approach it is necessary to help to overcome such limitations. However, the difficulties for providing a transdisciplinary methodology for the research of tipping points in sustainability science derives, among other reasons, from the existence of different ontologies as well as for conflicts in epistemologies and normative criteria used to describe and assess the systems of interest in which different disciplines operate (Tàbara et al., 2021; Milkoreit et al., 2018).

A key task then is how to design open, plural and transdisciplinary assessment processes for the assessment of SETPs, given that complex systems can only be described partially by one single perspective. This in turn would entail: (a) identifying and assessing different qualities of deep structural change occurring in the different kinds of systems in which transformations are needed, even though they may not necessarily or immediately appear to be connected, and (b) to represent complex dynamics derived from alternative interventions according to multiple time, spatial and social scales or dimensions. In particular, and regarding time scales, the causality of events and the apparently trivial fact that ‘timing matters’ are crucial elements for investigation of tipping processes in regional transformations processes: ‘what happens when’ - the sequence of events - is important, since actions from the distant past can initiate particular chains of reactions that have effects in the present - some largely unexpected. As Pierson (2000) suggested, ‘small’ events early on may have a big impact, while ‘large’ events at later stages may be less consequential. And in this sense, tipping points can be understood as the breaking of previous path-dependencies and lock-in situations that mark the entry to new locked-in states. However, using the chronologies, methods and time, spatial or social conceptual boundaries from one single discipline limits our ability to fully understand the complexity of addressing the full complexity of SETPs processes. To understand these complex processes, a systematic exploration of the underlying conditions and how they are conceived by different perspectives—e.g., in terms of transformability, resilience and specially, regarding systems’ sensibility to possible tipping interventions—subject to multiple time lags including social hysteresis—is necessary.

Sustainability transformations, whilst occurring at multiple levels of agency, they eventually materialise in places (Salomaa & Juhola, 2020). In fact, it can be argued that sustainability science is always a situated science. Research on the transformations of energy systems needs to pay especial attention to particular places, human geographies, spatial configurations and dynamics of networks within which deep transitions are embedded (Köhler et al., 2019; Bridge & Gailing, 2020; Coenen et al., 2021; Mattes et al., 2015; Naumann & Rudolph, 2020; Hansen & Coenen, 2015). Changing the configuration of energy production systems towards a distributed generation system based on renewables and multi-scale geographical shifts in energy demand underlines the importance of situating possible tipping points in socio-energy systems in specific places (Bridge, 2018). However, when trying to apply the concept of SETPs to sustainability transformations in places, the actual meaning of regions and communities also needs to be reconceptualised and novel modes of analysis of trans-local and trans-regional action are required. In terms of tipping points, cross-scale interactions may be better assessed and mapped out by examining the extent to which positive synergies between different kinds of actors and networks around transformative solutions are being formed, rather than using other more rigid and less action-oriented operationalisation criteria. Thus, collective action in regional contexts is very much dependent on many intertwined and complex factors which cannot easily or simply be reduced to ‘bottom-up/top-down dynamics’ nor to the simple aggregation of fixed individual patterns of behaviour within larger systems configurations (Byrne & Callaghan, 2014). Sustainability transformation processes do not occur only as a result of vertical and one-directional phenomena but in a much more complex, overlapping and dynamic processes of collaboration and competition between changing agents who operate under different perspectives, personal roles, interests, organisational logics or capacity of influence.

A novel approach in this regard would require a further elaboration on the notion of regions so as to integrate new components necessary to understand and enable sustainability transformations. That is, to consider not only the formal regions based on the ‘sameness’ in geographic, administrative, cultural or economic attributes; or the functional regions defined in terms of their operational links, flows and interactions; or the perceptual or cultural region related to areas socially constructed by cultural beliefs, feelings or attachment, or other collective imaginaries. This new approach may entail extending the functional category of region based on identifying what would be needed to be transformed for achieving a positive tipping point in sustainability terms. This would be close to what the EU refered to the Accelerator Regions (Hedegaard et al., 2020), although a transformative region, would also encompass dynamic transformations at multiple levels of agency, as well as in the other formal and cultural defining categories.

However, considering such a novel approach to regional change would also need to move away from simple and one-directional metaphors of causality in socio-cultural and technological change (see Hughes et al., 2022) towards understanding and enabling the conditions for transformative emergence. Using the notion of transformative emergence in tipping points would mean to abandon fixed and static ideas of individual agency (e.g., the rational actor paradigm) in their interactions with other organisational or large systems’ levels. That is, moving from synchronic perspectives of systems’ reconfigurations and changes occurring only at one point in time or one single level—e.g., at individual and organisational level with direct dependency among them—to understanding what multiple transformations of properties may emerge and influence in a recursive way multiple configurations at multiple periods of time—and also to acknowledge that no single or direct dependency relationships between agents and systems may occur among them (van Dijk, 2020; Humphreys, 2020; Schot & Kangera, 2018; Guay & Sartenaer, 2016). Further research using such dynamic understanding of agency-systems interactions in which both agents and systems do and need to change at the same time, may have profound implications for sustainability science and policy. And in particular for those approaches, such as in modelling, aimed at identifying positive tipping points derived from coupling multiple systems of solutions at different scales or domains of action.

In short, instead of one-directional and single end-point approaches, we advocate for a better understanding of those kinds of tipping interventions which may help to create the conditions for the emergence of more lasting and profound systemic effects in diverse but coupled social-ecological systems of reference; and do so at different levels of agency with special attention to be placed to individuals, communities and regions with higher potential for fast, positive systemic impact. Transforming systems require empowered transformative agency operating in enabling environments which induce to such transformations in a recursive, ‘multi-chronic’ mode. This novel approach to accelerating transformative actions in regions and communities would also call for the integration of both human and biophysical forces of change, insofar that improvements in biophysical conditions translate into improvements in human quality of life conditions and in turn generate multiple positive retroactive feedbacks in many kinds of systems (for the case of food systems see (Pereira et al., 2020)). But in any case, the possibility of such self-reinforcing positive learning loops leading to a systemic positive tipping point would be conditioned by the agents, networks and capacities required to implement transformative visions, and strategies in each particular regional contexts of action (Tàbara et al., 2018).