Governing Transitions in Cities: Fostering Alternative Ideas, Practices, and Social Relations Through Transition Management

Sustainability transitions pose novel challenges to cities that go beyond traditional planning and urban development policies. Such transitions require broader engagement, empowerment, and breakthrough strategies which enable, facilitate, and direct social innovation processes towards adaptive and innovative urban futures. The transition approach offers a set of principles, a framework, instruments, and process methodologies to analyse as well as systematically organise and facilitate such social learning and innovation processes. During the past decade, researchers and policy entrepreneurs around the world have been experimentally applying the transition perspective in practice under the label of ‘transition management’. This approach is based on bringing together frontrunners from policy, science, business, and society to develop a shared understanding of the joint complex transition challenge, to develop collective transition visions and strategies, and to start strategic experiments. In this chapter we zoom in on the different elements of transition management (i.e., principles, framework, instruments, process methodologies) and their heuristic and operational use in the urban context.