Actors in Sustainability Transitions

Abstract

The world is experiencing serious sustainability challenges, such as climate change and the loss of biodiversity. To respond to these sustainability challenges, there is a need for societies throughout the world to make urgent and radical changes. However, the conflict of interests that can be observed on the world stage makes the transition to sustainability extremely difficult.

In recent years, scholars have increasingly turned their attention to understanding the relationship between actors and sustainable change. However, there remains a lack of understanding of why and the ways in which actors contribute to sustainability. In a bid to bridge this gap in our understanding, this doctoral thesis explores the actors involved in sustainability transitions. It takes a critical view of the framework of the multi-level perspective on sustainability transitions. This approach was chosen as the prevailing literature on sustainability transitions tends to neglect human behaviour. Moreover, how companies contribute to sustainability transitions is still a sparsely investigated area of research. Thus, this thesis defines actors either as individuals who intentionally act for the benefit of sustainability or as companies that contribute to sustainability.

To meet the objective outlined above, this thesis combines literature reviews and qualitative studies. It consists of two conceptual publications and two empirical publications. The relevant literature is reviewed in the conceptual publications, and the empirical publications present the empirical data obtained from two qualitative studies involving 42 interviews with individuals active in the field of sustainability in Finland.

Theoretically, this thesis contributes to the existing literature by examining human behavior and motivations to provide new insights into the multi-level perspective on socio-technical transitions. Second, the thesis contributes by presenting an exploration of human behavior through sociological accounts. Third, this thesis contributes to extant knowledge by incorporating the life courses approach into the multi-level perspective framework. This doctoral thesis suggests that the findings related to the motivations and sustainable behavior of individuals may have relevance for other fields.

The results of this thesis imply that companies have a role to play in contributing to sustainability. The outcomes also support the existing understanding that there is a disconnect between company-level and system-level sustainability. This thesis contributes by arguing that poor integration may be a barrier to achieving sustainable development. Second, this thesis suggests that developing an understanding of the overlapping terminology employed in different disciplines could help to bridge the gap between system-level and company-level sustainability.