Talk #4: Machteld Simoens (Freiburg): Understanding Resistance to Transition and Change: Explanations of Discursive Lock-in
14 January, 4 pm GMT / 17.00 CET
Meeting ID: 981 8111 2153
Password: 383925
To accelerate sustainability transitions understanding processes of stability and change is key. This paper collects insights on this matter from interpretative environmental policy and discourse literature in order to enhance and inspire transition research. To do so, we identify and describe core discursive elements relevant for stability and change and expand the conceptualization of discursive dynamics in a socio-technical system. Based on this analysis, we show how the interplay of meta-discourses, institutionalized discourses, alternative storylines and discursive agency determine stability or change. Moreover, these insights point to unchallenged values and assumptions, incumbents’ power and the discursive dilemma of alternative storylines as three main discursive lock-in mechanisms that reinforce the stabilization of the (unsustainable) system and can explain resistance to change. With this crossover, we provide a more comprehensive view of locked-in systems and enable future transition research to operationalize discursive lock-in mechanisms next to its material and institutional counterparts. This view is crucial in order to develop targeted and innovative approaches to break the lock-in and support a transition towards more sustainability.
Machteld Simoens is a research associate and PhD candidate at the Junior Professorship of Societal Transition and Circular Economy at the Albert Ludwig University of Freiburg. Her main research interests are the political dynamics in transitions to more sustainable patterns of production and consumption. In her PhD research, Machteld focusses on the sustainability transition to a circular economy in the packaging sector, with an analytical focus on discourse and agency.