The spatial dynamics of deep transitions

Industrial societies are currently evolving along a fundamentally unsustainable trajectory, contributing to climate change, resource depletion and loss of biodiversity. A recent Deep Transitions framework (Schot and Kanger, 2018; Kanger and Schot, 2019) argues that this trajectory has been built up through the First Deep Transition: a 250-year co-evolution of multiple socio-technical systems. However, to date the Deep Transitions framework has completely neglected the spatial dimension of this process. This makes it unable to explain (1) how sociotechnical systems emerge in, gravitate towards, become linked in and disperse from certain locations; (2) how global constraints condition actors' responses in specific locations and how these responses, in turn, reproduce or transform socio-technical systems; (3) how these processes accumulate into socio-material landscapes, posing locationally varying constraints to major transformative change. As a response this paper aims to develop a middle-range theory of the spatial dynamics of Deep Transitions. Synthesizing insights from a broad range of fields nine propositions are developed on the spatial patterns and mechanisms of long-term multi-system coevolution. The resulting framework enables to explain the spatial genesis of the First Deep Transition and opens up a research agenda for studying the possibly emerging Second Deep Transition.