Socio-technical Scenarios as a Tool for Transition Policy: An Example from the Traffic and Transport Domain

Modern societies face huge challenges related to existing socio-technical systems which are difficult to tackle without fundmental change. An example is the agriculture-food system with various unsustainable features like BSE, foot and mouth disease, high nitrous emissions, etc. Another example is watersupply with symptoms like floodings, soil dehydration, water quality problems. Also the transport system faces structural problems like congestion, atmosferic pollution (NOx and particulates), and CO2-emissions. Such problems are deeply rooted in societal structures and institutions and are closely related to societal processes. To solve such problems fundamentally requires transitions or system innovations as is argued in the fourth Dutch National Environmental Policy Plan (VROM 2001). A transition in this sense denotes a long-term development process in an encompassing system that fulfills a basic societal function like feeding, mobility, energy, communication, etc. A transition implies a drastic change of the technical as well as the societal and cultural diminsions of such a system. This emphasis on coevolution of technical and societal change distinguishes transitions from more incremental processes of innovation which are primarily characterised by technnical development (successive generations of technologies) while the societal embedding of these technologies changes relatively little (cf. Geels in this volume)