Conflicts in sustainability transformations: Mapping the field and ways forward

Policy attempts to shape transformations towards sustainability are particularly prone to conflict. Particularly in times of multiple crises in increasingly stressed societies, comprehensive transformation strategies that question established normalities and aim to implement far-reaching and rapid changes generate complex patterns of conflict. While “traditional” environmental and technological conflicts were relatively limited in their social, spatial, and temporal scope and could be managed within the framework of existing and historically evolved conflict management arrangements, transformation conflicts exhibit new qualities. They intertwine socially, spatially, and temporally extensive confrontations over the extraction, use, and distribution of natural resources, technological innovations, and ex-novations, the construction and dismantling of infrastructure, but also conflicts over social status and power relations, identities and lifestyles, as well as fundamental values and ideas. The new quality of transformation conflicts poses a fundamental challenge to existing institutions and practices of conflict management in society and politics. If governance and policy-making are already being challenged by the comprehensiveness and complexity of transformations, they are further strained by the need to deal with their increasingly conflictual implications. Building on the case of climate change, this article examines the relationship between sustainability transformations and conflicts, develops a differentiated analytical concept of transformation conflicts, and discusses how these conflicts can be addressed, handled, and shaped through governance and policy. Based on a comprehensive literature review on sustainability transformations and incorporating findings from sociological and political science literature on conflict and social change, the basic understanding and types of transformation conflicts, their causes, manifestations, and effects are clarified. Using examples from climate policy, existing governance approaches for dealing with transformation conflicts will be examined and critically discussed. The aim is to identify strategic approaches that support a more reflexive, inclusive, and effective policy-making concerning transformation conflicts. Overall, the paper contributes to a better understanding of the conflict dimension of sustainability transformations by shedding light on the complex relationship between sustainability-oriented social change processes and societal conflicts. It provides conceptual starting points for a more in-depth consideration of conflict in the analysis and governance of sustainability transformations.