Deep Patterns, New Directions: Exploring Multi-System Pathways for Change – EU SPRI 2026

In preparation for the conference, we’re going to explore the Deep Transitions track Deep Patterns, New Directions: Exploring Multi-System Pathways for Change and what you can expect.

This track is designed for those pushing the boundaries of transition studies—scholars who look beyond single-system interventions to interrogate deep structural patterns, socio‑technical interdependencies, and the directionality of change. 

We’re excited to invite scholars, practitioners, and interdisciplinary thinkers to advance, critique, or expand the Deep Transitions (DT) framework (Schot & Kanger, 2018; Kanger & Schot, 2019) with their contributions while engaging with broader questions of systemic change across socio-technical systems. Rather than treating transitions as an unequivocal force for progress, the track interrogates its directionality, rebound effects, and wider environmental and social repercussions. It aims to explore how larger macro-level questions about degrowth, capitalism, geopolitical conflicts, democracy, globalisation and industrialisation relate to multi-system change and sustainability transitions.

When we called for abstracts, we welcomed contributions that address questions such as:

• How can the sustainability transitions field explore the larger questions about reshaping the economy and society within a multi-system change framework?
• How can the Deep Transitions framework be expanded, contested, or complemented to better explain systemic lock-ins and the conditions for transformative change across multiple socio-technical systems?
• What historical insights and multi-system analyses can illuminate the unintended consequences of past innovation trajectories and inform strategies for a Second Deep Transition?
• What roles do finance, investment logics, digitalization, circularity, destabilisation of a fossil fuel economy,  the military and other cross-cutting actors and domains play in enabling or constraining systemic shifts?
• Which governance mechanisms, niche-building strategies, and actor coalitions are most capable of not only redirecting single systems, but fostering alternative post-colonial and just transition oriented development paradigms reshaping the economy?
•  How can plural narratives, and novel analytical methods contribute to reimagining sustainable futures beyond universalist and Western-centric models?

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Overview of the track

Industrial modernity enabled unprecedented economic growth, lifting millions out of poverty. Yet its cumulative consequences now manifest as interconnected crises: accelerating biodiversity loss, climate destabilization, resource depletion, pervasive pollution, public health risks, and deepening socio-economic inequalities. These pressures have eroded trust in democratic institutions and fueled political polarisation, visible in the rise of far-right movements defending fossil-fuel regimes and rejecting environmental action. All of this unfolds within a context of geopolitical tension, rising insecurity, and fragile global governance.

Leveraging these larger macro-level questions and multi-system perspectives, the track explores how past transition trajectories produced a polycrisis, and a need for building a more sustainable economy and society. Based on a long term historical analysis, the track also invites contributions that explore how to use these insights for framing action. It aligns with conference themes on systemic policy interventions and new analytical methods by foregrounding multi-system couplings, socio-technical interdependencies, and the conditions under which they may be redirected. Particular domains of interest include destabilisation of the fossil fuel based economy; accelerating a circular society; the reshaping of a post-colonial global division of labor and western-centric model of progress; and the implications of digitalization and AI for addressing the polycrisis. Within these domains, many actors play a role. In particular the track invites contributions that focus on the role of military-industrial complexes; finance; labour; and indigenous communities bringing just transition issues to the fore.

Overall, the track seeks contributions that move beyond short term diagnosis of current times and interventions that focus on single system transitions. Instead we aim for historical diagnosis and articulating and operationalizing an epochal shift towards a new type of economy and society or a Second Deep Transition.

A huge thank you to the organisers Eu-SPRI Forum and INGENIO (CSIC-UPV) and everyone involved in the DT track. We’re looking forward to it! 

The Deep Transitions track comprises four sessions over two days. Below is a brief outline of the sessions and presentations.

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Session one

Chair: Diana Velasco

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Presentation: Deep Transitions: A theory of change for world builders

Keywords: Deep Transitions, World Builders, Polycrisis, Inter-well-being

Johan Schot, Diana Velasco

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Presentation: How radical is “radical”? Assessing the depth of sustainability interventions

Keywords: Deep Transitions, industrial modernity, sustainable interventions, transformative change

Silver Sillak, Laur Kanger, Sophie-Marie Ertel, Phil Johnstone

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Presentation: Discontinuities in Deep Transitions – Deep Discontinuities

Keywords: Discontinuities, Deep Transitions, deep discontinuities

Peter Stegmaier

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Session two

Chair: Phil Johnstone  

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Presentation: Place-based pathways to desirable futures: A conceptual and practical approach

Keywords: place-based pathways, regime rules, transition bundle, niche clusters

Diana Velasco, Phil Johnstone, Johan Schot, Clara Furio, Alejandra Boni, Míriam Acebillo-Baque, Lis Suarez-Visbal

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Presentation: Cross-system innovation and the spatial emergence of regional technological trajectories

Keywords: Twin transitions, regional trajectories, cross-system interactions

Oscar Yandy Romero Goyeneche, Deyu Li, Ron Boschma

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Presentation: Rethinking deep transitions from justice: an extension of the Intervention Points and Transformative Outcomes framework

Keywords: Transformative Innovation Policy, Justice, Transformative Outcomes, Intervention Points

Clara Furió-Vico

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Session three

Chair: Johan Schot

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Presentation: The diverse rice seed system in India’s Cauvery Delta: Competing, complementing or coexisting?

Keywords: rice seed system

Fleur Kilwinger, Koen Beumer

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Presentation: Industrial decarbonisation as a sociotechnical transition:innovation dynamics and policy implications from the Rotterdam harbour industrial cluster

Keywords: sustainability transition, industrial decarbonization, sociotechnical theory, industrial cluster

Pinelopi Efthymiadi, Christina Tigka, Konstantinos Koasidi, Alexandros Nikas

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Presentation: Patterns of niche development

Keywords: niche, regime, pathways, socio-technical trajectories

Gaston Heimeriks, Giovanna Capponi

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Session four

Chair: Johan Schot

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Presentation: Second Deep Transition and renewables

Keywords: Deep Transitions, Renewable energy, Socio-technical transitions, Directionality

Onat Gunes, Phil Johnstone, Johan Schot

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Presentation: Implementing digital window of opportunity to facilitate cross-system reconfiguration towards low-carbon transition: Evidence from China’s transition to smart e-mobility

Keywords: Digital window of opportunity, Multi-system interaction, Business model innovation, Smart e-mobility

Liu Shi 

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Presentation: State-orchestrated functional sequencing and policy mix dynamics in a latecomer's transition: Evidence from China’s automotive electrification

Keywords: Technological Innovation Systems; innovation policy mix; latecomer context; Functional dynamics

Shihchun Liu 

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Presentation: More than derisking: Bundles of functions and their effectiveness in cleantech industrial policy

Keywords: Empirical Analysis, Cleantech Commercialization, Public Policy, Industrial Policy

D. Cale Reeves, Em Finkelstine, Jonas Meckling, Laura Diaz Anadon

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References

Schot, Johan, and Laur Kanger. 2018. “Deep Transitions: Emergence, Acceleration, Stabilization and Directionality.” Research Policy 47 (6): 1045–59.

Kanger, Laur, and Johan Schot. 2019. “Deep Transitions: Theorizing the Long-Term Patterns of Socio-Technical Change.” Environmental Innovation and Societal Transitions 32: 7–21. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eist.2018.07.006.

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