Policies for accelerating sustainability transitions: Bridging insights from transition studies and policy studies

Pressing environmental and societal challenges, such as the climate crisis and social inequality, call for policy interventions that steer and accelerate sustainability transitions. In this chapter, we foreground four key intervention areas for such transition policies: providing direction to socio-technical transitions (directionality), creating and protecting novelty (niche support), destabilizing existing technologies and practices (regime destabilization), and coordinating transition processes (coordination). For each of these four areas we outline their theoretical rationale grounded in transition studies and offer interdisciplinary reflections based on research from policy studies. We then present and discuss fifteen concrete policy interventions aimed at accelerating the transformation of our systems of production and consumption towards sustainability, building on a comprehensive review of the relevant transitions literature. We evaluate these interventions with empirical findings from work published in leading transition journals and highlight potential research avenues for scholars who are interested in the intersection of public policy and sustainability transitions. Given the persistent resistance to and intense contestations around transformational policy interventions, we ultimately hope to spark more interdisciplinary exchange and research that bridges transition and policy studies on how to accelerate sustainability transitions.