Presenter: Natalia Lyly

Junior Researcher

LUT Business School

Presentation

System Work in Sustainability Transitions: How Actors Co-Enact Change in Urban Mobility

Abstract

How do sustainability transitions actually get enacted when entire socio-technical systems are deliberately reconfigured? Tracing the transition of an urban mobility system in the Helsinki metropolitan area – where actors sought to shift the system from mobility as a good to mobility as a service – we theorize how different types of actors co-enact system transitions toward sustainability.

We abductively develop the concept of system work and show how actors interdependently and interactively engage in three forms of such work as the transition unfolds: system foundation work, through which core system elements are reconfigured and reinterpreted around emergent roles; system structure work, through which new patterns of inclusion and interaction are established; and system substance work, through which actors dynamically interconnect their positions and actions as the system takes shape in practice.

Tracing these forms of system work across four stages of the transition, we show how feedforward dynamics that propel change are repeatedly entangled with feedback dynamics that stabilize the system into temporary settlements. In doing so, the paper contributes to the literature on sustainability transitions by conceptualizing system work as a form of inter- and multi-actor agency that unfolds among rather than within actors. The findings advance understanding of why ambitious system transitions often produce substantial yet incomplete change – and how such outcomes emerge from the very ways actors co-organize system transformation.