An actionable understanding of societal transitions: the X-curve framework.

Sustainability transition research seeks to understand the patterns and dynamics of structural societal change as well as unearth strategies for governance. However, existing frameworks emphasize innovation and build-up over exnovation and break-down. This limits their potential in making sense of the turbulent and chaotic dynamics of current transition-in-the-making. Addressing this gap, our paper elaborates on the development and use of the X-curve framework. The X-curve provides a simplified depiction of transitions that explicitly captures the patterns of build-up, breakdown, and their interactions. Using three cases, we illustrate the X-curve's main strength as a framework that can support groups of people to develop a shared understanding of the dynamics in transitions-in-the-making. This helps them reflect upon their roles, potential influence, and the needed capacities for desired transitions. We discuss some challenges in using the X-curve framework, such as participants' grasp of 'chaos', and provide suggestions on how to address these challenges and strengthen the frameworks' ability to support understanding and navigation of transition dynamics. We conclude by summarizing its main strength and invite the reader to use it, reflect on it, build on it, and judge its value for action research on sustainability transitions themselves. Supplementary Information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11625-021-01084-w.

Addressing perinatal health inequities in Dutch municipalities: Protocol for the Healthy Pregnancy 4 All-3 programme.

BACKGROUND: Health inequities are already present at birth and affect individuals' health and socioeconomic outcomes across the life course. Addressing these inequities requires a cross-sectoral approach, covering the first 1,000 days of life. We believe that - in the Dutch context - municipal governments can be the main responsible actor to drive such an approach, since they are primarily responsible for organising adequate public health. Therefore, we aim to identify and develop transformative change towards the implementation of perinatal health into municipal approaches and policies concerning health inequities. METHODS: A transition analysis will be combined with action research in six Dutch municipalities. Interviews and interactive group sessions with professionals and organisations that are relevant for the institutional embedding of perinatal health into approaches and policies regarding health inequities, will be organised in each municipality. As a follow-up, a questionnaire will be administered among all participants one year after completion of the group sessions. DISCUSSION: We expect to gain insights into the role of municipalities in addressing perinatal health inequities, learn more about the interaction between different key stakeholders, and identify barriers and facilitators for a cross-sectoral approach to perinatal health. This knowledge will serve to inform the development of approaches to perinatal health inequities in areas with relatively poor perinatal health outcomes, both in the Netherlands and abroad.

Sense of place and experimentation in urban sustainability transitions: the Resilience Lab in Carnisse, Rotterdam, The Netherlands.

Experimentation as a means of governance for sustainability transitions has been advocated for years by transition scholars and geography scholars. We propose that examining the impact of experimentation requires an understanding of its embeddedness in place as a socio-spatial context. This notion of embeddedness, which conceptually aligns well with the understanding of sense of place, is under-examined in sustainability transitions literature. By conjoining the sense of place and sustainability transition literatures, we conceptualize that sense of place can be one outcome of experimentation fostering sustainability transitions. We examine urban living labs as an open format of urban experimentation, where multiple actors interact with the aim to co-design, test, and implement governance innovations. From the literature, we have distilled three phenomena that relate to a sense of place as mechanisms for transformation: a symbolic understanding or meaning of place; a narrative of place that connects to a transformative vision; and new types of relations between people and place. With this conceptual lens, we analyze our case study, an urban living lab called The Resilience Lab in a neighborhood of the city of Rotterdam, The Netherlands. Drawing from a longitudinal case study research, we contend that urban living labs can connect a sense of change (transformation) with a sense of place by co-creating new narratives of place, by co-producing knowledge on new practices and new relations between people and place, and by allowing the co-design or (re)establishment of places with symbolic meaning. As such, urban living labs facilitate urban sustainability transitions.