The Multi-Level Perspective on Sustainability Transitions: Background, overview, and current research topics

This chapter describes the conceptual backgrounds, current debates, and future research topics with regard to the Multi-Level Perspective, which is one of the central frameworks in sustainability transitions research. It shows how the MLP spans multiple social science dichotomies (e.g., stability-change, agency-structure, behaviour-technology) by combining insights from evolutionary economics, sociology of innovation, and (neo)institutional theory. It describes the MLP’s three analytical levels (radical niche-innovations, incumbent socio-technical systems, exogenous landscape developments) and how these interact through four different phases (experimentation, stabilisation, diffusion, institutionalisation). The conceptual ideas are empirically illustrated with an empirical case study of the German electricity transition (1986-2022). The chapter also describes further thematic developments such as the articulation of four kinds of socio-technical transition pathways (substitution, transformation, reconfiguration, and de-alignment and re-alignment) and the elaboration of various actor roles and agentic processes across different dimensions. The chapter ends by identifying seven current research topics: 1) niche-regime interaction, 2) regime destabilisation, decline, and phase-out, 3) diffusion and acceleration, 4) multi-system interaction, 5) whole system reconfiguration, 6) incumbent reorientation, 7) trade-offs between the speed and depth of change.