IST 2022, CfP deadline extended to May 15th

Important – The submission deadline for the IST 2022 conference has been extended to May 15th 2022

With this Call for Papers, we invite contributions from the global research community for the 13th annual conference on sustainability transitions. This year’s conference theme will focus on conceptualising, comparing and evaluating sustainability transitions across places and scales, thereby highlighting the intellectual, methodological and policy challenges of understanding and governing sustainable and just transitions in diverse contexts. The IST conference will take place in the week after the UNFCCC COP 27 in Egypt and provides an opportune moment to reflect on sustainability transitions research questions.

There are good reasons to deliberately expand sustainability transitions research with a global perspective. Challenges such as climate change and sustainable production and consumption cannot be addressed within single territories (national or otherwise) and involve collaborations and contestations between different types of actors across places and scales. A global perspective is also important to ensure that sustainability transitions in one place do not negatively impact efforts and actors in other places or at different scales.

Exploring and governing sustainability transitions in a global context requires a deep engagement with the diversity in histories, cultures, politics, institutions and knowledge paradigms in and through which transitions unfold and are steered. What works conceptually, methodologically or from a transition policy perspective in some places, sectors or social contexts, and why, and not in others, deserves further scrutiny.

Hence, this year we specifically invite contributions that propose new empirical, theoretical, and methodological insights and approaches into how sustainability transitions unfold and are governed across the world, from the local to the global, and from the Global South to the Global North. Topics can include, but are not limited to:

• Transition dynamics beyond the usual suspects and commonly studied geographies and sectors.
• New frameworks and conceptual approaches for researching or governing sustainability transitions in novel places, sectors or social settings, including theorisation from the Global South.
• Novel methodological contributions that compare, contrast or evaluate sustainability transition policy and practice in diverse settings, including participatory and transdisciplinary methodologies.
• Indigenous perspectives and scholarship relating transition to issues of sovereignty, self-determination, land and water rights and traditional ecological knowledge.
• Perspectives on decolonising sustainability transitions especially in relation to questions of power, inequality, justice, post-colonial thinking and non-Western worldviews of knowledge.