From theory to practice of transition management: The case of Sustainable Living and Housing in Flanders

Our modern complex society and its problems of realizing long-term sustainable development necessitate new forms of governance. In recent years a number of publications have been made on transition management as a new mode of governance that explicitly deals with societal complexity (D. Loorbach, 2007; J. Rotmans, Grin, Schot, & Smits, 2004; J. Rotmans, Kemp, & Van Asselt, 2001). This approach towards dealing with governance and complexity explicitly links analysis of complexity to the governance hereof. Observed dynamics in society provide the basis for formulating governance strategies and instruments, while the implementation of transition management simultaneously leads to more precise or altered interpretations of observed reality. Transition management as formulated in (D. Loorbach, 2007) presents a framework for structuring governance processes directed towards societal innovation. This framework distinguishes between different types of activities (strategic, tactical and operational) and different phases (envisioning, agenda-building, experimentation and evaluation). The basic assumption is that this framework is generic and can be used to implement transition management within any specific context (being a specific policy domain or political culture). The proposed paper aims to illustrate how the framework can be used to implement transition management and under which conditions such an implementation of transition management can be successful. This will be done by analyzing the project ‘Sustainable Living and Housing in Flanders’, in which the two authors functioned as project leaders. Between 2004 and 2006, a transition arena and network were developed in Flanders, Belgium. This was the first transition management process outside the Netherlands and had two main objectives: to apply the transition management approach to sustainable living and housing, and to be able to evaluate the possibilities for transition management in Belgium. In this two-year project, the transition arena methodology was implemented to develop a vision, transition agenda and experiments for Sustainable Living and Building in Flanders. This paper evaluates the difficulties and possibilities for implementation of transition management in a specific context by use of the transition management framework. The evaluation will be based on the official evaluation of the project (Van Raak, 2006) and a retrospective comparison of this project with similar projects in the Netherlands and Flanders. The latter is done by the authors based on their own experience and knowledge and thus subjective. The combination of the formal evaluation of and the subjective reflection upon the project enables us to answer two questions: what are the possibilities for transition management in Belgium? And: how generic are the transition management approach and framework?