Department Environmental Social Sciences

MULTITRANS develops novel approaches for analyzing sustainability transitions that transcend places, scales and sectors

The transformation of infrastructure sectors such as energy, transport and water towards sustainability is one of the key challenges of our time. The ongoing climate crisis and accelerating urbanization are putting immense pressure on these sectors to structurally transform, decarbonize, and enable more inclusive service provision.

In the past, transition research has largely focused on analyzing sectoral transformations in specific places (e.g. the Netherlands), at specific scales (e.g. cities or nations), or within individual sectors (e.g. energy, mobility, agri-food, water). This focus has led to significant progress in explaining how to initiate, support and accelerate structural transformation processes within these defined contexts.

However, it has become increasingly evident that sustainability transitions are characterized by complex interactions across different places, spatial scales and sectors. Examples include city networks such as C40 promoting transformative energy solutions in their globally dispersed member cities or advances in information technology enabling transformative change in urban mobility (e.g. platform apps from the IT sector facilitating multimodal mobility solutions).

In the MULTITRANS project, we aim to develop novel conceptual frameworks and methodological approaches for analyzing transition dynamics that span spaces, scales and sectors. Building on recent theorizing in transition studies, economic geography and organizational institutionalism, we will develop and validate novel conceptual frameworks and methodological approaches to analyze transition dynamics in two sectors with fundamentally different structural compositions: urban mobility and urban water management.

Urban water management is characterized by a monolithic structural composition, with one infrastructure solution (pipe-based centralized water and sewage networks) being the taken-for granted ‘gold standard’ around the world. Urban mobility, in turn, represents a polycentric composition with private cars, public transport and active mobility (bicycles, walking, micro-mobility) jointly providing transport solutions in manifold ways. This difference in the sector’s structural compositions is expected to strongly influence how, where and through what multi-sectoral linkages transitions come about.

In urban water management, we will focus on the transition from large-scale, centralized, end-of-pipe water and sanitation infrastructures to small-scale, on-site water reuse systems. In urban mobility, we will study the shift from car-centric urban mobility to modal splits that favor active mobility and public transport. By analyzing and cross-comparing complex transition dynamics in these two structurally different sectors, we aim to develop a novel, general framework for conceptualizing and analyzing contemporary transition dynamics.

Our goal is to provide highly innovative insights into how and where promising transition dynamics are likely to occur, and at what spatial scales leverage points for transformative change reside in both sector types. By doing so, we aim to provide policymakers with specific insights into how urban, national and supranational policies can more effectively be coordinated in different types of sectors in order to accelerate sustainability transitions.