







































Ecology, Economy and Society–the INSEE Journal 2 (1): 3–8, January 2019 

 
COMMENTARY 
 

Sustainability Transitions from an Ecological Economic 
Perspective 
 

Inge Røpke   
 
1. INTRODUCTION  

The concept of sustainability transition is widely used, and the desirability 
of such transitions is generally emphasized. However, various authors and 
research fields attach widely different meanings to the concept, particularly 
with regard to the degree of radicality implied. This brief commentary 
introduces an ecological economic perspective on sustainability transitions, 
which can be considered one of the more radical versions of the concept. 
First, the ecological economic understanding of the challenges is presented, 
and second, some topical aspects of the research agenda of the field and 
some of its close cousins are outlined. 

 

2. THE SUSTAINABILITY CHALLENGES 

Ecological economics is based on the pre-analytic vision of the economy as 
a metabolic organism in the biosphere, keeping itself alive by taking in 
energy and materials from the biosphere, transforming them in metabolic 
processes and emitting waste back again. Globally, the organism has grown 
so large in relation to the biosphere that we now live in a “full world” (Daly 
2015). As the work on planetary boundaries illustrates (Steffen et al. 2015), 
we are already far into dangerous territory, and the prospects for the future 
are even more challenging due to continued population growth and 
pressure for improving living standards. 

 
 Aalborg University, Department of Planning, A.C. Meyers Vænge 15, 2450 København SV, 
Denmark; ir@plan.aau.dk 

Copyright © Røpke 2019. Released under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 
4.0 International licence (CC BY-NC 4.0) by the author.  

Published by Indian Society for Ecological Economics (INSEE), c/o Institute of Economic 
Growth, University Enclave, North Campus, Delhi 110007.  

ISSN: 2581-6152 (print); 2581-6101 (web). 

DOI: https://doi.org/10.37773/ees.v2i1.50  

mailto:ir@plan.aau.dk
https://doi.org/10.37773/ees.v2i1.50


Ecology, Economy and Society–the INSEE Journal [4] 

The background for the emergence of the “full world” economy is the use 
of fossil fuels. In terms of energy, human history has passed through three 
phases: hunter-gatherers using fire, pre-industrial agriculture adding draught 
animals and wind and water power, and the industrial phase adding fossil 
fuels and later also nuclear energy (Haberl et al. 2011). Each transformation 
has increased the availability of energy for human use. During the industrial 
phase, the abundance of fossil energy enabled an enormous increase in 
population and improvement in living standards. As the risk of climate 
change now limits the future use of fossil fuels, humans have to enter into a 
fourth phase in their energy history – this time in a situation where the 
number of humans is very large and where, for the first time, the 
consumption of energy per capita can be expected to fall. 

Since fossil fuels still constitute about 80 per cent of the global energy 
supply, the challenge is considerable.1 Furthermore, another nearly 10 per 
cent of energy use is still based on biomass, thus competing with food 
production and adding to the heavy pressure on biodiversity and 
ecosystems. Humans seem to be driving the sixth mass extinction of life on 
Earth, maybe even making Earth inhabitable for humans. 

Based on this understanding of the challenges, ecological economists argue 
that sustainability transitions ought to involve radical transformations not 
only of technologies but also of societal arrangements. Since it is not 
possible to solve problems of poverty through biophysical expansion in a 
“full world”, there is an ethical call for redistribution of resources from rich 
to poor – a redistribution that could also be helpful in reducing population 
growth. 

 

3. THE RESEARCH AGENDA: COMPLEMENTARY SYSTEM 
PERSPECTIVES 

The research agenda of ecological economics and related scientific fields, 
such as political ecology, industrial ecology and transition studies, covers 
the potential for sustainability transitions from many different angles. Some 
of these can be described in relation to the figure in the next page. The 
figure illustrates the classical ecological economic vision of the economy as 
a metabolic organism within the biosphere. At the boundaries, the organism 
takes in resources and emits waste back into the biosphere. These 
boundaries are immediately visible as sites for environmental  conflicts  that  

 
1 Calculations based on statistics collected from the International Energy Agency: 
https://www.iea.org/statistics/kwes/supply/ 



[5] Inge Røpke 

Figure 1: System Perspectives 

 

Source: Based on Røpke (2016) 

may call for transition processes. Studies of social-ecological systems, the 
management of commons and ecosystem services can be seen as examples 
of perspectives focusing on the boundaries (Berkes et al. 2003, Ostrom 
2015, Gómez-Baggethun et al. 2010). Most often, such studies concentrate 
on the input side of the metabolic organism – the management of land, 
forests, fisheries, etc. – and the scale is mostly local or regional. Besides, 
these studies explore the climate challenge as a commons issue, involving 
management at a global scale of an issue on the output side (Ostrom 2009). 
The increasing number of local environmental conflicts that follow from 
the ever-growing global metabolism is also the focus of studies from an 
environmental justice perspective (Martinez-Alier et al. 2016). A large 
number of conflicts have been mapped both on the input side, which is 
often characterized as the commodity frontiers, and on the output side, for 
instance, related to waste handling. 2  The studies not only highlight the 
environmental and social costs and the injustices related to biophysical 
growth, but also emphasize how local protests and related movements can 
contribute to sustainability transitions by obstructing unsustainable paths 
and pointing towards alternatives (Scheidel et al. 2018). 

 
2 See the maps here: http://www.ejolt.org/ 



Ecology, Economy and Society–the INSEE Journal [6] 

The environmental implications of increased metabolism are most visible at 
the boundaries, but the dynamics behind these implications mostly emerges 
far from the boundaries. The production processes transforming the 
resources into goods and services and their consumption constitute key 
dynamics. The concept of provision system is often applied to characterize 
the complex of institutions and technologies involved in the whole process 
of production chains and consumption that fulfils a certain function in 
society, for instance, referring to the provision of food, housing or 
transport. The need for transforming these provision systems to make them 
more sustainable is the core topic of the Sustainability Transitions Research 
Network.3 The field learns from studying historical transitions of provision 
systems, such as the transition from sailing ships to steamships (Geels 2002) 
or the establishment of the electricity system (Hughes 1987), in order to 
develop ideas for promoting sustainability transitions today. The time scale 
of these studies is thus relatively long, but obviously not as long as the one 
applied in relation to the three phases of human energy history. The system 
perspective in these studies highlights that “green” technologies are not 
always contributions to sustainability transitions, as some technological 
improvements may support and legitimize the continuation of systems that 
ought to be replaced. For instance, increasing the efficiency in the use of 
corn for biofuel production can be seen as counterproductive in relation to 
sustainability transitions of the food and energy systems. 

When provision systems are organized in very unsustainable ways, the 
background can often be found in the large global inequalities. For instance, 
the availability of cheap clothes and electronics in the rich countries depend 
on the low wages paid to workers in sweatshops in poorer countries (Schor 
2005). The inequality thus forms the basis for provision systems that enable 
rich people’s appropriation of large amounts of biophysical resources 
(Fuchs et al. 2015). The unequal access to resources is continuously 
recreated through various distribution systems that cut across the provision 
systems. The concept of distribution systems refers to, for instance, the 
organization of labour markets, the rules of international trade, the 
organization of property and patent rights, tax systems, and rules of 
inheritance. The transformation of these systems is just as important for 
sustainability as the transformation of provision systems. This point is 
increasingly acknowledged and reflected, for instance, in studies on how to 
transform the financial systems that have contributed heavily to the 
deepening of inequality (Røpke 2017). 

 
3 The research agenda of the network can be found here: 
https://transitionsnetwork.org/about-strn/research_agenda/ 



[7] Inge Røpke 

Much governance of the various systems mentioned above emerges from 
the processes that are endogenous to the development of the systems 
themselves and not always visible as governance. But some governance has 
the form of transparent interventions from the political systems that are 
spatially organized and characterized as geographical systems, referring to 
the political systems at municipal, national, regional and global levels. For 
instance, the national level is central to studies that focus on the 
relationship between economic growth and sustainability, exploring the 
potential for decoupling environmental impacts from GDP growth and the 
importance of multiplier and rebound effects (Jackson 2017). Increasingly, 
it is acknowledged that sustainability transitions can be successful in rich 
countries, only if improvements of environmental efficiencies are combined 
with rebound policies to ensure that the improvements are not followed by 
increased consumption (van den Bergh 2011). Furthermore, policies are 
needed to reduce inequalities so the standard of living for poor groups, 
nationally and globally, can increase although total material consumption 
has to go down. The growing field of ecological macroeconomics deals with 
the promotion of sustainability transitions at the national level through 
traditional macroeconomic policies as well as more radical institutional 
changes. Part of the discussion is concerned with the question of whether 
sustainability can be achieved within some sort of reformed capitalist 
framework, or whether the core institutions of capitalism have to be 
abolished. Some of the more radical positions are advocated by researchers 
belonging to the degrowth community, who emphasize that sustainability is 
not compatible with a system built on the search for profit and the 
continued drive for accumulation (Kallis 2018). 

Although only some of the perspectives related to ecological economics are 
included here, it is obvious that the study of sustainability transitions covers 
a broad array of approaches. In conclusion, this brief commentary 
emphasizes the need for working on many fronts to achieve sustainability, 
as well as the need for taking the interplay between different systems and 
aspects into account. Sustainability is as much an issue of institutions and 
power relations, as it is an issue of technology. 

 

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