Can we know? Predicting social tipping points

The concept of tipping points is rising on scientific and political agendas, describing the point in time in which a transition happens, the process of overcoming lock-in mechanisms and tipping from a previous system state into a qualitatively new state. Tipping points are well known in sustainability science, for example in climate system research, and are presently entering social sciences as well. There is little doubt that tipping points exist in both social and socio-technical systems, because we can observe that systems and societies are fundamentally different today than they were in the past. Such fundamental system shifts can be observed in many systems (e.g., mobility: horses to cars; communication: telegraph to telephone, to mobile telephone and the internet; human right: abolishment of slavery). The ongoing sustainability transitions, such as the energy transition, will mark similar systemic shifts into fundamentally different systems. If the energy transition is to be successful, the energy system must eventually pass a tipping point into a new stable system state, qualitatively different that the existing one. This raises the question of whether and how social and socio-technical tipping points can be predicted. The dominant view so far is that they can be observed ex post, but not predicted. However, we argue, if tipping points cannot be predicted, they are politically irrelevant, because that makes policy interventions to affect them impossible (or subject to guessing). Because we can observe (ex post) that tipping has happened and the changes in technology and regime that enable them, we have significant knowledge about how tipping works. And because we can also observe the effects of policies that also at the time of implementation (i.e., ex ante) were intended to trigger deep changes, we here suggest that tipping points can be predicted, and that they can be predicted with some precision – but that precision and predictability is higher in smaller, sectoral systems and lower in larger, more society-wide systems. In this paper, we elaborate on the conceptual issues of predicting tipping points and illustrate our arguments with ongoing developments in which we argue that tipping points can be predicted. All three cases are controversial, but illustrative for the conceptual argument: we will describe why there will be no nuclear renaissance; why the demise of the gasoline car is a done deal; and why the transition to renewable electricity can only fail through dedicated policies to transform the system back to fossil fuels.