My name is Derk Loorbach. I'm a Professor of Socioeconomic transitions and the Director of the Dutch Research Institute for Transitions, also called DRIFT, at Erasmus University Rotterdam. Our mission at DRIFT is to develop knowledge in and with practice, government's business industry, civil society, to contribute to accelerating and guiding societal transitions to sustainability. What we do is called action research and we focus on the persistent unsustainability of our economic development. For a very long time, as scientists and activists pointed the negative impacts of burning fossil fuels and how we consume natural resources. Climate change and the decline of biodiversity have become a top priority now on political agendas and in business strategies. But it has taken decades to reach these points. While in the meantime, the fossil-based linear economic model has only been further institutionalized and developed. Since the 1980s have liberalization, privatization, and globalization ensured and boosted the global economic boom. But it came at the expense of our natural environments and led to increasing socioeconomic inequalities globally and within countries. The finance system is intimately linked to this global, unsustainable economic model. It facilitates the movement of capital across the globe to evade control. It maximizes private profit at the expense of public values and ignore structurally, ecological and social values. It is inevitable from a transition perspective that this pathway of persistent, unsustainable development, will be disrupted. Transition research draws on historical examples of transitions as well as Complex System Theory to analyze and anticipate societal transitions by pointing at the underlying patterns and mechanisms. Transitions in society are in essence the outcome of, on the one hand, the process of a build-up of innovation, and on the other hand, a breakdown of existing structures. This takes a very long time, often decades before such transformative pressures start to build. A dominant system, or in our jargon, regime gets stuck, society creates pressures for change and alternative start to emerge. What then can follow is a relatively short period of chaotic, non-linear, and disruptive change in which old elements of the previous regime and new alternatives together start to form the structure of a new system. Consider, for example, the mobility system, especially the system around individual fossil cars. For long, have alternatives being available and have outsiders argued for a rapid shift to electric or hydrogen smaller cars, shared cars and so on. But individual routines are persistent, but also industries are inert and national policies are optimized to support and improve the current system. But in spite of this, these lock-ins outsiders have started early on to develop alternatives ranging from Toyota with the Prius, or later on Tesla, to, for example, cities that start to create new car-free zones, new mobility providers that offer shared mobility or smart mobility solutions, or individuals that change their mobility routines. What seemed unimaginable only a few years back is now actually happening. A major and accelerating shift away from individual mobility, at least in metropolitan and urbanized contexts. This quick example highlights the role of agency in transitions where incumbents and vested interests and establish actors are primarily seeking to improve the existing by making things more efficient. There are always other actors that are exploring and anticipating potential transitions and work on radical transformative alternatives in what we call niches, new technologies, practices, business models, lifestyle styles, ideas and so on can develop, grow, and gradually become more mainstream, less alternative, cheaper and if dominant structures and systems start to destabilize, they can become part of mainstream, what we call transition management is a governance and action research approach that takes this insights into agency in transitions as starting points. We use our analytical models to map the dynamics in a given system, identify sources and spots of transformative agency, and bring these actors together to reflect upon their common transition challenges. We then go through processes of formulating guiding principles, visions, transition pathways, through what we call backcasting, and identifying transition experiments. These processes help to create actors and networks of transformative change. Networks that have a shared outlook and agenda that translates into their daily action and the conversations and interactions they have. These processes also help to analyze and understand the transition in its context, what is happening and what is driving involved actors. So for us, this is what we call action research. In the mobility system where this transition towards electric mobility is emerging, we apply this to anticipate this disruption and momentum in order to influence the direction of change. Ideally, a mobility transition in cities will lead to a phase out of individual cars, and especially fossil individual cars, but will also achieve the most effective outcomes and the most socially effective mobility system. Think for example, in terms of reducing resource use, space use, and the overall economic costs. From an economic, policy and business perspective, this is not the most likely outcome. There was likely is what we see now a shift to individual electric mobility, but this would fail to address traffic jams, parking problems, resource use, and transport poverty. Transition management for the financial system should try to guide and accelerate the emerging transition towards an economy that is beneficial for nature and people, that values, ecology, and equity before individual and privatized profits. To translate this general ambition into actual change implies hard work. There are the routines of financial assessments, transactions valuation, reporting, accounting, pricing, negotiation, and payment that all need to change over time. Or think of the legal conditions, regulations, implications, and guarantees. By now, the pressures are increasing to transform all these aspects of the finance system and all sorts of radical alternatives emerge. So the ingredients for transitions in the finance system are there. Now it's up to creative and transformative actors to scale and diffuse these. In the end, transition is more evolutionary, than revolutionary. It is through all the small steps that you and I can take every day that we built transition over time.
