The roles of actors in sustainability transitions

Sustainability transitions involve complex, long-term societal changes driven by diverse actors embedded in dynamic structural contexts. This chapter adopts a role-based perspective to examine agency in sustainability transitions, distinguishing between social roles and transition roles. Social roles refer to societal positions and categories which constrain and enable human activities, which evolve with changing societal values and priorities. Transition roles reflect actors’ stances and actions within and their engagement with transition dynamics. The chapter explores the conceptual and empirical applications of these perspectives, providing an overview of research trends and gaps. While social roles offer insights into institutional change over time, transition roles highlight how actors strategically position themselves to influence or respond to transition dynamics. The analysis underscores the fluid and negotiated nature of roles, emphasizing their utility as heuristics for understanding institutional change and actor agency. The chapter concludes with recommendations for future research, advocating for longitudinal studies on social roles to deepen our understanding of institutional change and for using the transition roles as a boundary object for action-oriented, transdisciplinary sustainability transitions research.