Transformative governance: Exploring theory of change and the role of the law

Transformative change is becoming a key concept in the scientific conceptualization of sustainability. We assess five environmental governance approaches: adaptive, earth system, evolutionary, transformative and transition governance. We ask 1) What characterizes the different governance approaches, and how do they understand the dynamics of change? 2) How is the role of law conceptualized in the context of these governance approaches? The five studied approaches present different and complementary ways of describing change and how it unfolds or can be steered. According to our literature review, collaboration, leadership, learning, plurality, empowering, innovation and vision are seen as key mechanisms for change, while law is often oversimplified in these governance approaches, either as an enabler of or as a barrier to change towards sustainability. Future avenues of research could include how disruptive elements could be introduced as a way of catalyzing change and how to strengthen legal analysis to transformative change.

Highlights

Transformative governance is scarcely defined in environmental/sustainability governance.

• The role of law is often oversimplified in sustainability governance studies.

• We perform a review of key scientific literature (N = 65).

• We assess how five governance approaches theorize change towards sustainability.

• We assess how such approaches envision the role of law and regulatory processes.

Done in collaboration with BioAgora and RELIEF projects.