Making Sense of Shocks and Crises: Helpful or Disruptive for Sustainability Transitions?

Crises and shocks are often perceived as focusing events that can open a window of opportunity for transformative policy change towards sustainability. Yet, there exists ample critique of such an opportunity narrative: crises and shock events may primarily challenge a system’s resilience and overwhelm it, or they don’t lead to any transformative change at all. What the research field is lacking so far is a review of theories and case studies that explain when and how a crisis may lead to what outcome for major policy change and sustainability transformations. We draw on socio-technical transitions research and classic public policy theories, including the Multiple-Streams Framework or the Advocacy Coalition Framework, as well as on more issue-specific research like Nohrstedt’s that directly analyzes the effect of natural disasters on major policy change. Based on the reviewed literature, we develop a theoretical framework that highlights i) which conditions must be met so that a crisis can lead to transformative policy change and ii) which ideal-typical pathways exist that explain why a shock event may have a productive, neutral or negative effect for sustainability transformations. We provide examples of crises and shock events that illustrate the usefulness of the different mechanisms that we come up with. The framework will be useful for further empirical use, as the general hope that disruptions may break path-dependencies and trigger change processes stands in stark contrast to empirical studies that find no transformative effect of crises such as pandemics or natural disasters. By identifying the factors crucial for crisis-induced change towards sustainability, researchers can determine the case-specific issues of why a crisis did or did not spark change. In times of multiple crises, our framework offers researchers and policymakers guidance on how to prepare for, and how to harness crisis-induced windows of opportunity for sustainability transformations.