Governance for Sustainability Through Transition Management

The paper discusses the concept of “Transition management” that has been adopted by Dutch policy makers for working towards sustainability. The purpose of the paper is threefold: First, to describe the conceptual model of transition management. Second, to examine how the concept sits with concepts of comprehensive planning, adaptive governance, interactive governance, and multilevel governance from policy science, and the concept of change management from management theory. And third, to examine instrument aspects of transition management, something that has not been done so far. The paper will also discuss policies for transition management undertaken by the Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs and try to explain why the Dutch government decided to adopt transition management as a framework for policy choices and why sustainability needs an approach of evolutionary governance of which transition management is an example. Index: Abstract ..........................................................................................................................1