Prologue Cuaderno 157 Transition Design [Special Issue]

Abstract

Transition Design is an emerging, transdisciplinary area of research, study and practice aimed at addressing systemic (wicked) problems and thereby catalyzing societal transitions toward more sustainable, equitable and desirable long-term futures. It recognizes that such problems are always interconnected, and addressing them requires systems level change (that is, the reconfiguration of socio-technical-ecological systems). While this is a long-term endeavor, it requires incremental, systemic interventions in the present at multiple levels of scale. The necessity for systems level change is increasingly being recognized by practitioners, academics and activists, making Transition Design and other approaches to systems change ever more relevant. In various ways, all the papers in this volume explore how to bring this about, recognizing that it is a transdisciplinary, long term, place-based project that needs to engage marginalized and disenfranchised stakeholders, and weaves together theory and practice and academic and non-academic forms of knowledge.