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Environmental Innovation and Societal Transitions 39 (2021) 191–205
Available online 9 May 2021
2210-4224/© 2021 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY license
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
Legitimizing transformative government
Aligning essential government tasks from transition literature with normative
arguments about legitimacy from Public Administration traditions
Rik B. Braams
a
,
c
,
*
, Joeri H. Wesseling
a
, Albert J. Meijer
b
, Marko P. Hekkert
a
a
Copernicus Institute of Sustainable Development, Utrecht University
b
School of Governance, Utrecht University
c
Dutch Ministry of Infrastructure and Water Management
ARTICLE INFO
Keywords:
Transition
Government
Civil service
Public administration
Legitimacy
ABSTRACT
The literature on transitions recommends that both the government and the civil service should
engage with profound societal problems requiring a fundamental socio-technical system change.
We analyzed a corpus of 100 publications to cluster the transition tasks that the transitions
literature attributes to government. These tasks are set off against the normative arguments of the
Public Administration (PA) traditions that legitimize government action. Our analysis shows that
although some traditions present a normative basis for specic tasks, many of the transition tasks
assigned to government do not align well with any of the PA traditions. Thus, the normative basis
for legitimizing sociotechnical transitions provided by the PA traditions, is inadequate. This
nding is consistent with the recently agged urgent need for a new, legitimizing rationale for
societal transition. We conclude by presenting the contours of transformative government as a
new PA tradition to legitimize the government’ s transition tasks.
1. Introduction
Over the past decade, there has been increasing attention for achieving goals related to persistent, wicked, societal problems, such
as climate change (EC 2011; Cagnin et al., 2012; Hicks, 2016). This trend is illustrated by the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs),
the ’grand societal challenges’ dened by the EU, and the new mission-oriented innovation policy approach that has been adopted by
governments at various levels (Brown, 2020; Mazzucato, 2018; Kuittinen et al., 2018). Solving these societal problems requires
sociotechnical transitions (e.g., Diercks et al., 2019; Schot and Steinmueller, 2018; Geels et al., 2016) and thus a fundamental shift
towards sustainability in the sociotechnical systems by which our society is organized (Zolfagharian et al., 2019). From the Transition
Literature (TL), recommendations and tasks have originated that call on both the government and the civil service to engage with the
deeply rooted societal problems that require societal transitions (Bergek et al., 2015; Kivimaa and Kern, 2016). If these tasks are to be
put into action, a government must be willing to take them on. So far, TL has not delved into the normative schemes of government to
understand whether a government is a priori willing to take on these new tasks. In other words, the roles played by the government in
transitions are still underexplored (Borras and Edler, 2020).
This research did not receive any specic grant from funding agencies in the public, commercial, or not-for-prot sectors.
* Corresponding author: Address: Princetonlaan 8a, 3584 CB Utrecht, The Netherlands.
E-mail address: r.b.braams@uu.nl (R.B. Braams).
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Environmental Innovation and Societal Transitions
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/eist
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eist.2021.04.004
Received 17 September 2020; Received in revised form 25 March 2021; Accepted 20 April 2021
Environmental Innovation and Societal Transitions 39 (2021) 191–205
192
Within the government, the civil service plays an essential role in executing these transition tasks – although this role has received
even less scientic attention. Civil servants and politicians are often assumed to constitute a dichotomy within the government.
However, Svara (1999) argues that the civil service is complementary to politicians, as both are crucial for the joint pursuit of sound
governance. Civil servants interact with scholars and other stakeholders, initiate projects, make roadmaps, suggest pathways, prepare
political debates, operationalize goals, translate these goals into policy and implement these policies (Pressman and Wildavsky, 1973).
As in any policy, the success of transition policy depends on these inherently administrative tasks. Legitimizing the execution of these
tasks for civil servants requires a normative basis that will be explored in this study. Weber and Rohracher (2012) have showed that
such a normative basis should be more than a market failure argumentation for transformative change.
Since governments are expected to direct and accelerate transitions towards sustainability (Borras and Edler, 2020), civil servants
are assigned various transition tasks. However, to execute these new tasks legitimately, such tasks need to be positioned within
normative frameworks that are acceptable to the civil servants and the governance systems in which the tasks are embedded.
Normative frameworks have been developed in the Public Administration (PA) literature at different periods in time to represent
evolving public values and narratives of legitimation (Bourgon, 2011). Such frameworks are called ’traditions’, and they include the
constitutional, discretionary and collaborative tradition
1
(Stout, 2013). However, these traditions do not consider the notion of
sociotechnical transitions and the implications of transition tasks for government legitimacy. Simultaneously, scant attention has been
paid to interpreting these traditions from the perspective of sociotechnical transition (Termeer et al., 2017).
In this exploratory review, we examine the extent to which these two strands of literature – on Public Administration and on
sociotechnical transitions – theoretically align, in order to uncover possible tensions, synergies and complementarities as well as to
arrive at the synthesis needed to legitimize the government’s role in sociotechnical transitions. The underlying rationale developed in
this paper for this synthesis focuses on the need for intervention, rather than on evaluating its effectiveness or efciency.
In the following section, we describe the Transition Literature (TL) and Public Administration (PA) literature, and then we discuss our
methods in Section 3. Subsequently, Section 4 reviews the TL to distill the government’s transition tasks and then analyzes the PA traditions
to explore how their rationales on transition align or conict with these transition tasks. From this, we establish the compatibility of the TL
and PA traditions, so as to assess what transition tasks are considered legitimate for civil servants to undertake, and under which traditions.
In Section 5, we reect on the development of the idea of transformative government, as a new tradition that can provide the legitimation
for the government’s role in the sociotechnical transition. Section 6 concludes by summarizing the main contributions of this paper.
2. Arranging the different foundations
2.1. Transition literature
The Transition Literature originated from innovation studies and complexity theory around the year 2000, with an analytical focus on
supporting the emergence of systems of innovation as well as on destabilizing existing, dysfunctional structures (K¨
ohler et al., 2019; Kivimaa
and Kern, 2016). The most dominant views in TL include the Multi-Level Perspective (Geels, 2002; 2004), Technological Innovation Systems
(Hekkert et al., 2007; Bergek et al., 2008), Strategic Niche Management (Kemp et al., 2007; Schot and Geels, 2008) and Transition Man-
agement (Rotmans et al., 2001; Loorbach, 2010). The Multi-Level Perspective and the Technological Innovation Systems approach are
primarily conceptual and analytical frameworks to explain how innovation and transitions arise. In contrast, Strategic Niche Management
and Transition Management approaches are explicitly prescriptive and are meant to guide interventions to enable and trigger transitions.
The Multi-Level Perspective (MLP) places niches in the context of two higher levels of structuration – the sociotechnical regimes and
exogenous landscape – to provide a more holistic transitions perspective as emerging from the interplay of these three analytical levels
(Geels, 2002; 2004). The Technological Innovation Systems (TIS) approach analyzes the emergence of technological innovation, typically
using the structural-functional approach to identify systemic problems that inhibit the development and diffusion of focal innovations
(Hekkert et al., 2007). When comparing these ideal-type TIS functions with actual policy, analysts can suggest prescriptive solutions for
policy. Strategic Niche Management focuses on radical innovations that require protection in their early stages of development and diffusion
to break through into the regime (Schot and Geels, 2008). Finally, Transition Management has developed a practical, policy-oriented
framework, which helps policymakers shape transitions, with strategic, tactical, operational, and reexive activities (Loorbach, 2010).
2.2. Public administration traditions
Public Administration traditions are generally accepted normative frameworks that represent evolving public values and narratives
of legitimation on the role of the government (Bourgon, 2011). Stout (2013) identied three PA traditions that promote distinctive roles
for the civil service from the perspective of legitimacy, namely the constitutional, the discretionary, and the collaborative tradition.
Bokhorst states that ’legitimacy is here dened as the justied, legal, politically acknowledged, socially accepted right to execute au-
thority’ (Bokhorst, 2014) 20). The traditions emerged in sequence during the twentieth century to diagnose problems and to suggest
solutions, using distinct ideological frameworks to represent evolving public values in institutions (Stout, 2013; Bourgon, 2011).
It is important to note that not one, but all rationales are always present in public institutes (Stoker, 2006). They can be seen as
sedimented public values (Van der Steen et al., 2018), as they promote different values as essential for civil servants as well as provide
1
Also referred to as Traditional Public Administration, New Public Management and New Public Governance, respectively (Bevir, 2010; Osborne,
2006).
R.B. Braams et al.
Environmental Innovation and Societal Transitions 39 (2021) 191–205
193
different answers to what good governance is, but they do not replace the values of a previous tradition. Therefore, if new tasks are
needed to enable transition, these will most likely be qualied and assessed through all rationales in an institute.
Below, the main PA traditions and their implications for transitions are outlined. Although some studies have investigated how
competing PA traditions describe the way innovation is generated and adopted. (Hartley, 2005; Hartley et al., 2013; Rothstein, 2012;
Sørensen, 2012), no PA studies have yet been conducted on a long-term transformative change to overcome societal problems.
2.2.1. Constitutional tradition
At the beginning of the twentieth century similar traditions in PA emerged in Western Europe and North America as a reaction against
patronage and clientelism practices (Fung, 2009), which failed to deliver ’a predictable and right-based service’ (Torng and Tri-
antallou, 2016: 14). To overcome this issue, a new PA framework was designed by Weber (1978), which revolved around hierarchy,
procedural accountability, and predictability (Wilson, 1989). Legitimacy comes from the strict implementation of laws, procedures, and
rules, which would make policy predictable for citizens (Rothstein, 2012). This constitutional tradition perceives civil servants as skilled
professionals who strictly follow orders in a neutral, rational, and accountable way (Stout, 2013; Pollitt, 2003; Olsen, 2006).
An extensive bureaucracy is an attempt to reduce uncertainty and create predictability. In such complex organizations, innovation
is rare because it changes complicated routines, patterns, and tasks. The most minor changes are therefore ’likely to rouse the ire of
some important constituency’ (Wilson, 1989: 69). Thompson (1965) even argued that bureaucracy and innovation are an inherent
mismatch. The values of the constitutional tradition undermine creativity and entrepreneurship; as a result, changes in public in-
stitutes tend to be limited and incremental in nature (Torng and Triantallou, 2016: 16).
2.2.2. Discretionary tradition
The discretionary tradition emerged during the 1980s as a reaction to bureaucratic systems being too big, expensive, slow, inef-
cient, and inadaptable (Pollitt, 2003). The discretionary tradition focuses on the responsibility to efciently achieve desired out-
comes. This tradition is heavily based on New Public Management (NPM) theories with a neoliberal ontology (Pollitt, 2003; Osborne
and Gaebler, 1993; Wynen et al., 2014). NPM marks the introduction of managerial autonomy, performance management and in-
centives, and competition (Hood, 1991; Osborne, 2006; Wynen et al., 2014). These reform elements shifted legitimacy within gov-
ernment institutes from input and procedures to outcome accountability and results (Osborne and Gaebler, 1993). As a cure for
bureaucratic monopolies which are considered to be costly and of low quality, NPM advocates deregulation, public-private compe-
tition, and the introduction of performance incentives (Osborne, 2006; Torng and Triantallou, 2016).
NPM tries to mimic the private market as much as possible by creating an environment that pushes the organization and staff to perform
better, to take risks and to innovate (Wynen et al., 2014). Civil servants have technical and strategic rationality and should act responsibly,
efciently and effectively (Stout, 2013). They should see themselves as entrepreneurs and work towards superior service delivery, while
adhering to the principles of competition and cost-consciousness (Osborne and Gaebler, 1993). Competition is typically considered a
permanent driving force for innovation, which government typically lacks (Osborne and Gaebler, 1993). Decentralization and deregulation
should also compensate for this lack of systematic change, according to the discretionary perspective (Torng and Triantallou, 2016).
2.2.3. Collaborative tradition
The collaborative tradition started at the end of the 1990s, when a new set of problems led to a reorientation towards the State.
Problems regarding terrorism, the environment, digitalization, and asylum seekers had more to do with security and fairness than with
efciency (Bevir, 2010). In this tradition, the government nds itself between the forces of globalization on the one hand and the
increasing diversity of society on the other, and it is not able to cope with these new complexities on its own (Bevir, 2010).
The collaborative tradition is about managing multiple societal centers of power by relying on self-organization, interdependence,
and resource exchange between actors, while limiting the scope, power, and discretion of government (Rhodes, 1997). As it is
increasingly challenging to control swift societal changes with limited means, the government can no longer be held wholly
accountable for society’s problems. This process is called the hollowing out of the state (Rhodes, 1997). In a fragmented polity, or a
centerless society (Bevir, 2010), government becomes just one of many actors.
Under the collaborative tradition, legitimacy is thus ensured by giving interest groups and citizens direct inuence over the policy
process, which should lead to more successful policy implementation (Rothstein, 2012; Bouckaert, 1993). Decentralized actors should be
empowered and encouraged to take bottom-up action, creating a demand upon which the government can act (Sørensen, 2012). Together
with these actors, civil servants produce public value by creating inclusive networks and partnerships, and by facilitating self-governance.
In the collaborative tradition, civil servants should see themselves as guardians of egalitarian interaction, giving technical advice. They
should be responsive through a process of social inclusion and empowerment (Bevir, 2010; Rhodes, 1997; Stout, 2013).
As Sørensen put it, the collaborative tradition ’provides spaces in which a plurality of competent actors is able to use their
knowledge, creativity, entrepreneurship, and resources to nd new and better ways of getting things done’ (2012: 218). It helps to
establish trust and to destabilize routines for integrating new practices, perspectives, and perceptions, as this could lead to a
restructuring of the rules of the game and a redenition of roles and responsibilities (Metcalfe, 1993). However, there is a growing
concern that the collaborative tradition may also restrict democracy because networks become ’centers of power and privilege that
give structural advantage to particular private interest…’ (Klijn and Skelcher, 2007: 588), which erodes ministerial control and
therefore accountability (Willems and Van Dooren, 2011).
2.2.4. Public ’Administration’s rationales
To construct a starting point to examine transitions from the PA traditions discussed above, we build on the comparative models of
R.B. Braams et al.
Environmental Innovation and Societal Transitions 39 (2021) 191–205
194
Stout (2013) and Torng and Triantallou (2016). These studies provide holistic insight into the PA traditions by constructing these,
using an extensive set of variables (Stout, 2013: 100; Torng and Triantallou, 2016: 14–15) such as political ontology, principle
theory, political authority, problem diagnosis, preferred solution, overall goal, role of employees, criteria of proper behavior, source of
legitimacy, and rationality.
2
These models were combined into the following three overarching categories for assessing the transition
tasks from the perspective of PA traditions: (1) their primary problem-solution diagnosis, (2) civil servants’ role perception, and (3) the
characterization of legitimate action. Table 1 provides an overview.
To summarize, the constitutional rationale is obedience-driven, as authorization to inuence transition must result from politi-
cians’ transition plans. From a discretionary perspective, the civil service should focus on performance, and transition results should be
achieved via the market. The collaborative rationale focuses on emergent coalitions, and transition results are realized through
collaboration with a wide range of societal parties.
2.3. The gap between transition literature and public administration literature
The study of the role of government in sociotechnical transitions should build on the TL to provide information on transition tasks.
It should also build on the PA traditions, and consider the normative frames to which the tasks should be linked for legitimate action.
However, these two strands of literature are largely disconnected; sociotechnical transitions are barely analyzed within the PA tra-
ditions (Termeer et al., 2017), and TL analyses do not link with PA’s normative frames.
Below, we apply a systematic analysis of the literature to bring these separate branches of academic work into a single analytical
framework by contrasting operational transition tasks with the fundamental presuppositions of the PA traditions. We aim for a
thorough confrontation between TL and PA, in order to map out the fundamental tensions. The following section describes how we
approached this process.
3. Method
To assess how compatible transition tasks are with PA traditions, three analytical steps were taken. First, we reviewed the Tran-
sition Literature to cluster the transition tasks expected from the government into aggregated categories of transition tasks for the
government. Second, we interpreted these tasks from the perspective of the normative assumptions of the PA traditions in order to
identify which transition tasks are most problematic for the government. The compatibility issues were so fundamental that we
included a third step, namely proposing a new PA tradition that is aligned with transitions thinking. Below, these three methodological
steps are described in greater detail.
3.1. Step 1: Extracting transition tasks from the literature
We used an inductive approach to distill government tasks from the major transition frameworks. For each of the four frameworks,
we identied two sets of ten articles. The top ten all-time most cited articles were used to generally conceptualize the framework, while
the top ten most cited articles since 2018 present recent applications of these frameworks. This resulted in a total of eighty articles and
book chapters collected using Google Scholar in October 2019. To correct for possible omission bias, we added a set of twenty articles
(the ten all-time most cited and the ten most cited since 2018) on Transformative Innovation Policy, which focuses on policy on system
change and transformation (Schot et al., 2017). This led to a reformulation of three of the eighty codes.
An open coding procedure in NVivo 12 was used by the rst author when he was manually searching for government tasks (see Fig. 1 for a
Table 1
The problem-solution diagnosis, role perception of civil servants, and legitimate action described for the three main Public Administration traditions.
Constitutional tradition Discretionary tradition Collaborative tradition
Problem-solution
diagnosis
Problems of irregularity and
unpredictability are core reasons for the
existence of bureaucracies. Obedient and
neutral civil servants are the solution (
Pollitt, 2003; Wilson, 1989).
Ineffectiveness and inefciency exist in
governments without any competition. The
government should focus on performance
by including market incentives (Hood,
1991; Osborne and Gaebler, 1993).
The growing inability to exercise control
in a complex world leads to the necessity
of sharing responsibility in networks.
Societal changes are therefore co-directed
by society (Bevir, 2010; Rhodes, 1997).
Role perception of
civil servants
Civil servants should not be in the position
to inuence the direction, but should follow
their political leader. Civil servants are
trained for the job so that they can execute
tasks in a uniform way (Stout, 2013;
Wilson, 1989).
Civil servants are entrepreneurs who adhere
to the principles of deregulation,
noninterference in the market, competition,
and cost-consciousness (Osborne, 2006;
Stout, 2013).
The role of the civil servant is to focus on
emergent coalitions and bring actors
together to construct a solution accepted
by all (Sørensen, 2012).
Characterization of
legitimate
action
The procedures and processes should be
constitutionally transparent, rational and
traceable from the beginning and precisely
followed (Wilson, 1989).
Deregulated markets are the default option
to give direction and achieve results. If
markets are unfeasible, public institutes
should mimic private ones (Osborne, 2006;
Wynen et al., 2014).
To gain legitimacy in dealing with
structural change, a wide range of societal
parties must participate, unlocking
different capacities (Rothstein, 2012).
2
See Table 4 in the Appendix 1
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Environmental Innovation and Societal Transitions 39 (2021) 191–205
195
owchart of the coding process). The text around the search hits was checked for relevance, then labelled as tasks using the original wording,
and subsequently clustered into more generic categories with more differentiated purposes and characteristics. A continuous, iterative effort
was made by the team to reduce the number of categories. After seventy articles, saturation was reached, i.e., no new transition tasks were
identied, illustrating the reliability of our approach.
a) In the 100 articles, we searched the text for ’government’ (95 articles, with 1380 references), ’state’ (81 articles, 813 references),
’ministry’ (38 articles, 242 references), ’public policy’ (77 articles, 246 references), ’administration’ (36 articles, 101 references),
’bureaucracy’ (10 articles, 11 references), ’policy makers’ (67 articles, 343 references), ’public sector’ (15 articles, 66 references),
and ’civil servant’ (53 articles, 263 references).
b) The main inclusion criterion was that tasks had to be suggested to government, as a recommendation, an instruction or after an
evaluation. Search hits were excluded if they only described a historical situation. This produced 301 references in 59 articles. For
example, the search text ’state’ yielded: ’The role of the state in innovation policy is changing. Rather than being limited to
supporting the capability and connectivity of and within systems to innovate, the state is increasingly seen [by authors such as
Mazzucato, 2011 and Weber and Rohracher, 2012]—again—as a major actor in shaping the directionality of innovation’ (taken
from Boon and Edler, 2018: 435). This was coded as ’State is increasingly seen as a major actor in shaping directionality of
innovation’.
c) At rst, the tasks were clustered inductively, but after three iterative rounds, familiar clusters (from the perspective of a transition
scholar) emerged, for example, related to ’giving direction’ and ’supporting niche activity’, which were then used as the codebook.
Returning to the previous example: we clustered the previous code into the category ’Give direction’, together with for example,
’Articulate demand’, ’Give legitimacy to technological eld’, and ’State ambition and set targets’. The code’ State is increasingly
seen as a major actor in shaping directionality of innovation’ was incorporated into the more generic code ’Guiding role and show
leadership in structural change’.
3.2. Step 2: Assessing transition tasks for their compatibility with ideas from public administration literature
We assessed the aggregated transition tasks (Section 4.1) on their compatibility with the PA ideas on transition, to expose any
incompatibilities. From this, the ideal-type reaction expected from the civil service to these transition tasks is described per tradition.
Transitions take several decades to unfold. (Kanger et al., 2020), in which the conguration of actors and their interests shifts (Geels
and Schot, 2007). We focus our analysis on the take-off phase of the transition, as conicts between the old and the new are expected to
be magnied in this phase – requiring a broader mix of transition tasks (Loorbach, 2010; Kivimaa and Kern, 2016; Turnheim et al.,
2018).
First, the task categories as well as the specic tasks were assessed on their compatibility with PA traditions by interpreting them
through the constructed rationales on transition (see Section 4.2 for tasks categories and Table 3 for the specic tasks). Each task (both
the category tasks and the specic tasks) was evaluated as acceptable if (1) it was in line with the dominant problem-solution diagnosis,
(2) it was aimed at the conventional role of civil servants, and (3) it could be legitimized in the specic PA tradition. If one of these
three conditions was not met, we deemed it unlikely that such a task would be readily accepted by the civil service.
Second, in this process of logically understanding the compatibility, to measure if a task category was generally accepted by the PA
tradition, we categorized all specic tasks as ’accepted’, ’hesitance’ or ’rejected’ per tradition. Hesitance refers to tasks that civil
servants in principle do not reject, but for which they need explicit authorization from their minister. A task is categorized as accepted
if all three conditions are met and no explicit authorization from a minister is needed. The leading categorizing question was the
following: ’Based on the reasoning of the different traditions, does a civil servant accept, hesitate about or reject this specic transition
task?’. The intercoder reliability check indicated a high level of reliability based on 51 textual fragments coded by two researchers.
3
a. Search through
text with words
indicang
government.
b. Search hits in text
were checked to see
if sentence has a
task assigned to
government.
c. All coded tasks
were clustered into
categories, and then
the process of
merging codes and
clustering taks was
iterated.
Fig. 1. Flowchart of the iterative coding process.
3
The alpha we found was in the order of 0.8,
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3.3. Step 3: Constructing the new public administration tradition
This last step was a discontinuation of the systematic analysis until now. The results from Steps 1 and 2 warranted the construction
of a new PA tradition with a rationale supportive of transitions. This new tradition was constructed by the same dimensions as used by
Stout (2013) and Torng and Triantallou (2016) for their characterization of traditions. To tentatively introduce such a new
tradition, we built on parts of PA traditions that are supportive of transition tasks and complemented them with elements from PA
literature and political science literature, and with ideas on including interest groups. Acknowledging that more theoretical and
empirical work is needed to build a new PA tradition, we listed some tentative tensions underlying this new PA tradition as revealed by
our analysis, which provides guidance for further analysis.
4. Results
4.1. Transition tasks for government
Inductively coding 100 transition articles yielded 80 different transition tasks for the government, which we aggregated iteratively
into ve overarching categories (see Table 2). These categories show similarities with the intervention points described by Kanger
et al. (2020): (1) Stimulate different niches, (2) Accelerate niches, (3) Destabilize the regime, (4) Address the broader repercussions of
regime destabilizations, (5) Provide coordination to multi-regime interaction, and (6) Tilt the landscape. Nevertheless, these inter-
vention points are only found in the MLP literature and are not explicitly directed at government.
The rst category was labeled Give direction. The failure to direct has been highlighted by Weber and Rohracher (2012) as a
fundamental transformation failure that should give the government legitimation for transformative change. The guidance of the
search given by the government (Function 4 TIS; Hekkert et al., 2007) through the articulation of demand, visions and ambition as well
as taking the lead in establishing policy objectives and plans through policy strategies (Rogge and Reichardt, 2016) should steer the
generation and diffusion of innovation towards societal needs (Edler and Boon, 2018). The direction is also provided by harder market
interventions, such as standards provided by law.
The second category was Create governance. This category recommends that the government should play an essential role in
opening up the process of transition for multiple stakeholders and collective action, encouraging others to participate (e.g., Fagerberg,
2018; Rotmans et al., 2001). Additionally, the government plays a vital role in developing and maintaining network relations and is
responsible for specic collective outcomes within these networks. The strategies to support and develop interactions in a network
mentioned in S¨
oderholm et al. (2019) and Newell et al. (2017) formed the basis of the subheading.
The third category was Support the new. This category recognizes the fact that the government should engage with, support and fund
new developments. It focuses on aiding niches which could lead to new congurations breaking into the dominant sociotechnical
regime over time (Kivimaa and Kern, 2016). Thus, the government is required to engage with, facilitate, and fund new developments
(e.g., Hekkert and Negro, 2008; Bergek et al., 2008).
The fourth category was Destabilize the unsustainable. It captures ’regime destabilization’ tasks (Loorbach, 2007; Rotmans et al.,
2001) that involve the proactive weakening and phasing out of specic regime processes, so that they can be replaced by niche in-
novations for systemic change (Turnheim and Geels, 2013; Kivimaa and Kern, 2016). This includes policies putting economic pressure
on the regime or banning certain practices (Kanger et al., 2020). Of the ve different transition categories, Destabilize the unsustainable
is the least mentioned in the literature.
The fth category was called Develop internal capabilities and structures. It is internally focused and encompasses tasks around
developing internal capabilities and structures to facilitate external tasks. By requiring capabilities such as new skills and structures,
the government can enhance its ability to play its role and promote and direct societal transitions (Quitzow, 2015; Boras and Edler,
2020). To achieve effective internal capabilities and structures, the government should critically review its own role and routines
(Bergek et al., 2008; Goddard and Farrelly, 2018; Kemp et al., 2007).
From the ve categories and their multitude of underlying tasks listed in Table 2, an ideal type of government can be seen to
emerge. This assertive type of government can be constructed along the same lines as used by Stout (2013) to describe the other PA
traditions. This type of government is well-equipped to handle the urgent need for systemic and sustainable change and holds humans
responsible for creating and xing problems. Societal failure to adapt to emerging sustainability problems due to systemic lock-in and
the evident, immense need for change implies a legitimate basis for action. The core value of a proposed government seems to be
socio-ecological resilience. This ideal type expects civil servants to adopt the role of system architects and catalysts who search for
systematic, sustainable change. Their process of reasoning is technocratic, abductive, and normative. This ideal type of government
action, as required by TL, is the foundation on which we construct transformative government.
The different theoretical strands of TL differ in the emphasis which they place when prescribing tasks to the government. In general,
Giving direction, Creating governance and Supporting the new are the most prominent of the externally oriented government tasks, while
Destabilize the unsustainable is often overlooked, even though breaking down the dysfunctional aspects in the current regime is a crucial
transition activity requiring a government. In addition, all transition frameworks recommend that the government should develop
internal processes that enable it to better support and steer transition.
4.2. Transition tasks assessed on their compatibility with PA transition rationales
In this section we assess the ve transition task categories to detect possible incompatibilities with suggestions from the PA
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Environmental Innovation and Societal Transitions 39 (2021) 191–205
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Table 2
Assigned tasks to government prescribed by Transition Literature.
Category of transition tasks Number of articles assigning tasks to
Government / Total number of
references
Specic transition tasks
1: Give Direction 25 / 72 - Articulate the direction: Articulate demand (1), Develop missions (2),
Guiding role and show leadership in structural change (3), State ambition and set
targets (4), Select experiments (5), Translate ideas into priorities and actions (6),
Create a vision for the future (7),
- Construct policy strategies in order to direct: Create public organizations to
link emerging markets with societal challenges (8), Create stable policy
frameworks regarding guidance and market formation (9), Justify new policies
and government intervention (10).
- Recongure the market: Create and shape markets (11), Form markets
through minimal consumption quotas (12), Give direction through establishing a
favorable tax regime (13), Give legitimacy to a technological eld (14), Help the
market decide on strategic investments (15).
- Direct through enforced regulations: Enforce laws and IP rights (16),
Standardize and regulate (17).
2: Support Governance 27 / 65 - Activate actors: Acknowledge the third sector and consumers (18), Encourage
parties to participate (19), Make room for a variety of voices, arguments and
interpretations (20).
- Guiding organizational arrangements: Create coalitions and make covenants
(21), Facilitate the development of networks (22), Facilitate Public-Private
Partnerships (23), Improve governance (24), Mediate in brokering (25), Be the
niche manager (26).
- Goals achieving strategies: Ensure the process of co-evolution leads to a
desirable outcome (27), Facilitate reciprocal learning from experimentation (28),
Mobilize private nancial organizations (29), Organize platforms for collective
action (30), Stimulate collective learning process (31), Stimulate discussion (32).
3: Support the new 39 / 102 - Engage in entrepreneurial experiments: Embrace innovation as an option
and make it assessable (33), Engage with new niche actors (34), Organize
interaction between emergent technology groups and government (35), Steer from
within a niche (36), Provide room for experimentation (37).
- Establish market formation: Build benecial infrastructure for innovations
(38), Create, protect and facilitate niches (39), Give temporary exemption from
regulations (40), Mitigate initial negative impact of innovation (41), Remove
institutional barriers (42), Stimulate and initiate new pilots and developments
(43), Support diffusion (44).
- Price-performance improvements and resource mobilization: Create
innovation funds (45), Fund education (46), Fund experiments (47), Invest in new
technologies (48), Public procurement (49), Stimulate with materials and
subsidies (50), Support complementary technologies (51), Support research (52),
Help nd funding (53).
- Help new developments develop and diffuse: Introduce and demonstrate
new technologies and use them to set expectations (54), Communicate about new
developments (55), Develop sufcient technological variation (56), Train third
parties’ capacity and capability (57).
4: Destabilize the unsustainable 16 / 21 - Control policies and make signicant changes in regime rules: Introduce
extra goals and measures to redirect adverse developments (58), Reform tax
system to tax the unsustainable (59), Restrict use of unsustainable practices (60),
Introduce policies that erode unsustainable regimes (61)
- Reduce support for dominant regime technologies: Address market failures
responsible for unsustainability (62), Provide evidence from experiments for
regime shifts (63), Slow down or stop new unsustainable developments (64).
5: Develop internal capabilities and
Structures (to enable external
tasks)
21 / 41 - Rethink own role in a transition: Take a holistic perspective (65), Align social
and environmental challenges with national innovation objectives (66), Embrace
opportunities (67), Internal focus on upscaling (68), Revise and critically evaluate
own role and regulation (69).
- Development of new competencies: Become more entrepreneurial (70),
Analyze innovation systems (71), Build dynamic organizational capabilities (72),
Understand new technological developments (73).
- Monitor and evaluate: Continuous monitoring and evaluation (74), Develop
the capacity for learning (75), Learn to experiment and explore (76).
- Establish mechanisms for policy coordination: Coordinate between public
institutes (77), Create new institutional conditions (78), Embed processes in
institutes (79), Set up responsible institutes (80).
R.B. Braams et al.
Environmental Innovation and Societal Transitions 39 (2021) 191–205
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traditions (see Table 5 in the appendix for an overview).
4.2.1. Constitutional rationale
The core premise of the constitutional rationale is the focus of civil servants on implementing decisions made by their ministers.
Therefore, Giving direction, which is already difcult in an unpredictable political environment, is even more problematic in this
tradition, because no bottom-up direction or continuity can be expected from civil servants.
In this tradition, Creating governance and starting the process of transition for active participation by the government are not the
responsibility of civil servants. They regard voices other than the minister’s as only of secondary importance, and they are reluctant to
bring parties together to stimulate co-creation or collective learning; after all, this may lead to unequal treatment as not everybody can
be invited, and in the constitutional rationale this is considered a delegitimization of their role.
Tasks involving Supporting the new have the same difculties as explained above; the constitutional rationale warns strongly against
picking winners and against preferential treatment to facilitate new developments. Civil servants are expected to refrain from granting
exceptions – even temporarily. Consequently, while the success of a transition depends on the support and protection of specic new
developments, the constitutional tradition does not legitimize these tasks.
To Destabilize the unsustainable, the civil service needs explicit orders from politicians. According to this tradition, civil servants
should refrain from deciding what to break down. Only if orders are given by the minister and the rules apply to all domains and parties
in the same way, can the government apply uniform, rational and traceable procedures to put pressure on existing regimes.
Working on transitions calls for Developing internal capabilities and structures. Some new capabilities, such as the ones related to the
tasks’ learn to experiment and explore’, ’be more entrepreneurial’ and ’take a holistic perspective’, imply high degrees of freedom and
new forms of reasoning from civil servants. From a constitutional rationale, this leads to friction as discretionary space ought to be
minimized and work should be traceable and executed through standards and procedures. However, as civil servants need to act
rationally and be neutral, they are expected to be highly educated. Therefore, in this tradition it is feasible to develop the necessary
capabilities and structures (to make scale, developing capacity for learning and monitor, ’embedding process in institutions’, and
’setting up responsible institutions’).
To conclude, civil servants working in the constitutional tradition do not have the authority to execute new transition tasks. Hence,
they can only steer and support such tasks if the minister has made a decision for a particular transition. A minister who advocates a
transition would certainly accelerate steering the transition, particularly by Giving direction; however, most tasks will still be at odds
with the expected roles of civil servants.
4.2.2. Discretionary rationale
Within the discretionary rationale, civil servants should mimic market mechanisms and must be wary of disturbing the market.
Giving direction is not a task for the government, except when something is accepted as an obvious market failure. In addition, the
emphasis on efciency and effectiveness is problematic in the case of transition processes due to the complex, nonlinear dynamics and
the long-time horizons. Their preferred alternative, an incremental or lean approach, does not work in the case of system trans-
formation (Hartley et al., 2013).
If it makes the process more efcient, emerging market parties may be included in the creation of governance with public-private
partnerships. However, tailor-made solutions could lead to higher costs and less efciency and are therefore discouraged. In addition,
the discretionary rationale discourages the sharing of knowledge, collective learning and open innovation, as it is perceived to interfere
with competition (Hartley et al., 2013).
The discretionary rationale is likely to be skeptical about Supporting the new since it advocates that the market, rather than the
government, determines what developments are promising. It may support general early-stage innovation because of its knowledge
spillovers, but a government is not supposed to stimulate specic, normatively chosen new market developments. As the discretional
rationale follows the dominant market paradigm, new developments based on other assumptions, for example new business models
based on sustainable and social propositions, are likely to be ignored (Hartley et al., 2013).
Destabilizing the unsustainable will also be met with skepticism if it is perceived as market interference – ’picking losers’. The
discretionary rationale will argue that the market itself breaks down undesirable situations. Interference is only acceptable if market
failures are evident and accepted as such. However, if no market failure is acknowledged by politicians, the discretionary rationale
holds that there is no legitimacy to act.
Developing the internal capabilities and structures needed for an entrepreneurial mindset is undoubtedly encouraged, from the
perspective of deregulation, noninterference, and competition. Civil servants are expected to be trained to be cost-conscious and to use
innovation to improve effective and efcient service delivery. If the focus on transitions compels the government to take responsibility
for coordination and directionality back from the market, an apparent ideological mismatch emerges between the conceptualization of
the entrepreneurial mindset envisioned by the discretionary rationale, which is entrepreneurial concering efciency and effectiveness
only, and what the transition literature means by a ’policy entrepreneur’, namely an actor who is moving the transition forward.
To conclude, a general unwillingness to intervene in the market is decisive for civil servants working in accordance with the
discretionary tradition. This results in a limited capacity of the government to proactively shape the transition. In particular, Giving
direction and Destabilizing the unsustainable are not seen as tasks for the government but rather tasks for the market.
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4.2.3. Collaborative rationale
From the collaborative rationale, neither governments nor markets have the upper hand in Giving direction to the transition.
Ministers can make normative decisions, but they also have to acknowledge that they need broad support in society. With the
articulation and development of demands and missions, civil servants should take into account the interests of all relevant actors, even
actors clearly belonging to the current, dysfunctional regime. The insight that a sustainability transition implies losers and will
consequently provoke resistance by vested interests that need to be overcome is not widely supported in this tradition. Hence, the more
radical decisions needed for a societal transition are unlikely to be taken, since broad stakeholder support is needed.
The collaborative rationale serves the transition tasks of Creating governance well. This rationale focuses on empowering all parties
and acting within networks. Working with deeply ingrained ideological differences and power imbalances within a coalition is one of
the more signicant challenges that this tradition must face (Hartley et al., 2013). However, the accommodating attitude towards
objections of vested interests inhibits transitions.
The collaborative rationale takes a constructive view of Supporting the new; it afrms government’s role in supporting new collective
developments by creating niches, demonstrating and legitimizing innovations as well as organizing interaction between technology
and government. However, as this rationale focuses on the inclusiveness of all parties, it is difcult to establish a consensus on which
new developments should be facilitated. This may create hesitance in civil servants about the execution of such tasks.
Destabilizing the unsustainable requires an inclusive coalition in this rationale. This is problematic since parties invested in the old
regime are most likely not inclined to agree to phasing out their practices, creating obstacles to reach consensus. This rationale is
responsive to reactions from society, acknowledging that the government is unable to govern without broad support. The government
is no longer the singular actor who decides what must be broken down, but shares this responsibility with the market and societal
actors, leading to potential deadlock and general unwillingness in civil servants to enact. This tradition, therefore, requires massive
pressure from society to transform certain domains.
The collaborative rationale entails engaging holistically with other and new parties and learning from them. The Development of
internal capabilities and structures needed for transitions is viable from a collaborative rationale. However, the possibility of imple-
menting all different recommendations is limited because the government is no longer the only actor who is in control (although it is
still an important actor). It thus shares the responsibility of acquiring new skillsets within a network.
To conclude, from a collaborative perspective, nation-states are reducing their inuence on societal processes as they are sharing
increasingly more responsibilities with a broad range of stakeholders. From this perspective, the potential losers in the transition are
just as relevant as the frontrunners, making the government less effective in facilitating system change. In this tradition, broad co-
alitions and inclusion are required, limiting government’s executive power and vision. As the transition literature expects government
to steer, support and destabilize, it ignores the bounded capacity of the government that is postulated by the collaborative rationale.
4.3. Misalignment of TL and PA
Fig. 2 and Table 5
4
provide an overview of the compatibility of each specic transition task with the different PA traditions.
Fig. 2 highlights that the three PA traditions do not align well with the government’s transition tasks. First, the PA literature does
not perceive Giving direction as a task for civil servants, but instead as a role for the political side of government (constitutional
rationale), for the market (discretionary rationale), or for society as a whole (collaborative rationale). Second, the constitutional and
discretionary rationale do not explicitly focus on Creating governance. From the collaborative rationale, the government is the place
where the different interests meet; however, it strives for broad agreement, and therefore the pace of the transition is likely to be
slowed down. Third, Supporting the new confronts the impartial status that civil servants strive for in all traditions, leading to rejection
or hesitance regarding the prescribed task. The collaborative rationale focuses on supporting emergent groups and activities in the rst
stages of innovation, but it lacks the legitimacy to support the growth and scaling up of specic trajectories. Fourth, Destabilizing the
unsustainable, or putting the old regime under pressure, will immediately evoke public and political debate because this determines
who will lose their economic advantages. Civil servants will therefore reject this task without explicit political direction. Last, in all PA
traditions the civil service is expected to Develop new capabilities. However, tasks aimed at enhancing the discretionary space for civil
servants are rejected by the constitutional rationale.
The analysis presents both the opportunities and limitations for civil servants adopting the transition tasks. The constitutional
tradition appears helpful in accelerating the transition when a government decision has been made to Give direction and to Destabilize
the unsustainable. However, due to the volatility of politics, this tradition may nd itself at odds with the necessity of long-term political
commitment to a transition. The discretionary tradition provides an opportunity to Give direction and Destabilize the unsustainable
structures if market failures are accepted. In many sustainability transitions, negative externalities are apparent, but the civil service is
still generally unwilling to act on recommended transition tasks without explicit political backing. The transition tasks Create gover-
nance, Support the new and Develop internal capabilities benet most from the collaborative tradition. This tradition is open to renewal
and new stakeholders, but less open to Give direction and Destabilize the unsustainable.
4
See Appendix
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Environmental Innovation and Societal Transitions 39 (2021) 191–205
200
5. Towards transformative government
Due to the fundamental incompatibilities between the existing PA traditions and the transformative tasks assigned to government,
we propose the development of a new, additional PA rationale. This rationale labelled ’transformative government’, connects the
transition literature’s rationale of solving societal problems through a sociotechnical transition to accepted legitimacy claims from the
PA literature. A transformative government is a government that understands, accepts and executes transition tasks, building on a new
normative framework (see Table 3). It synthesizes notions of system change with an understanding of administrative processes,
legitimacy, and democracy to enable a legitimized pursuit of transition tasks.
Thus, transformative government as a new PA rationale builds on the various understandings of transition tasks in transition
literature, on fundamental discussions on innovation and democracy in political science (e.g., Sørensen, 2017), and on a reconstructed
relationship between civil service and politics by PA (Svara, 1999; see, e.g., Hartley et al., 2015 for public value framework and Meijer
et al., 2019 for Open Governance as a new paradigm).
The transformative government rationale focuses on solving societal problems by a sociotechnical transformation. The legitimacy
basis for the new tradition is the idea that the government is the guardian for particular ’weak’ interests that are not sufciently
Fig. 2. Accepted/rejected ratio of transitions tasks in Public Administration traditions. The different diameters of the globes symbolize the dif-
ferences in the number of tasks within the tradition. See the corresponding table in the Appendix.
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Environmental Innovation and Societal Transitions 39 (2021) 191–205
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represented by politics, the market, or societal collaboration. This guardianship results from a conscientious socio-ecological ontology
and from recognizing the planetary boundaries and thresholds (Rockstr¨
om et al., 2007) as well as the interests of the future generation
and natural entities. The guardianship directly relates to broad societal objectives for long-term sustainability, such as the Sustainable
Development Goals. The role of the civil service is to be the system architect, safeguarding the alignment of social and environmental
challenges for the entire duration of the transition.
This outline of a transformative government rationale provides a starting point for analyzing the role of government in a societal
transition. The rationale provides a basis for legitimizing transformative government, but it also raises various issues that require
further exploration and debate and that need to be addressed in further research to develop this tradition.
The rst issue is the democratic basis for the directionality provided by civil servants. Kattel and Mazzucato (2018) describe the
shift in innovation policy from a focus on the quantity of innovation (i.e., economic benets though the number of patterns and jobs)
towards its quality (i.e., the orientation towards societal goals) as a normative turn (Daimer et al. (2012) and see Weber and Rohracher
(2012) on strategic broadening). They emphasize the importance of setting the direction of innovation towards sustainable growth.
Within transition theory, this normative turn is even more pertinent than in innovation literature (K¨
ohler et al., 2019), as it maps the
direction of change a priori, e.g., presuming the urgent need for sustainable solutions. As the analysis above shows, if directionality is
not backed up by broad societal support, legitimacy within the civil service immediately becomes problematic. If civil servants provide
the direction based on their role as guardians of sustainability, the democratic debate is cut out, triggering resistance to the proposed
task. In a democratic system, the role of parliament is then marginalized. We contend that the transformative government tradition
requires that we rethink and deepen the complex relationship between political-administrative relations and democratic dynamics and
legitimacy in transitions.
A second issue is the fact that if legitimacy is based on urgency and necessity, it may lead to technocracy. Urgency and necessity as a
source of legitimacy appears to be justiable in the scholarly debate in transition literature (see Hysing and Olsson, 2018 for their
account of Inside Activism); however, if any action is legitimate as a consequence of its urgent necessity, regardless of other values, the
discussion is depoliticized (Swyngedou, 2010). Once a discussion is depoliticized, the proposed solutions become authoritarian or
technocratic. Sadowski and Selinger (2014) argue that technocratic tendencies are being justied by considering a government’s
interventions as a responsibility to society, surmounting extensive political disagreements, and thus replacing politics itself. Tech-
nocratic solutions may have little consideration for questions about justice and fairness (Sadowski and Selinger, 2014), and thus for
political decision-making. There is no a priori reason for society to limit itself to a particular mode of sustainable development (Grin
et al., 2010); in other words, sustainable development is essentially a matter of political judgment (Loeber, 2004). Transformative
government should therefore keep different pathways open and develop precautionary methods of early action, which can help civil
servants to take a long-term perspective, so that transition paths can be actively debated with a broader audience without losing vigor
and pace.
A third issue is a political-administrative deciency in handling transition goals. The PA literature not only pays limited attention to
technological innovation (Meijer and L¨
ofgren, 2015), but it also remains theoretically underdeveloped regarding a government’s
transformative responsibilities. As a result, the leading frameworks in PA might frustrate the civil service in executing the tasks needed
for transitions. Traditional strategies to steer society are ineffective and do not focus on transition (Meadowcroft, 2005). However,
eager governments increasingly wish to be advised on how they can rethink their policies and institutional settings when dealing with
transitions (Turnheim et al., 2020).
In sum, politics, especially in times of change, is known for its volatility (Meadowcroft, 2005). The stability and direction of the
transitions may best be conserved by means of the guardianship of civil servants, but it is not clear how to do so legitimately and
democratically. This may require political innovation, which means an intentional effort to (1) alter political institutions and pro-
cedures, so as to enable the civil service to guide transitions for the entire duration of the transition (several decades), (2) change the
political decision-making processes, so as to give the necessary mandate, legitimacy, and inuence to the civil service to safeguard
transitions, and (3) formulate and codify these new roles in policy (Sørensen, 2017). This requires rethinking the complementarity and
interdependence between politics and the civil service (Svara, 1999, 2001). In debunking the strict political-administrative dichotomy,
transformative government may nd new forms of independence, leadership, responsibility, and thus legitimacy.
Table 3
The problem-solution diagnosis, role perception of civil servants and legitimate action described for transformative government.
Sociotechnical transition rationale
Problem-solution diagnosis Transformative government would solve societal problems through sociotechnical transition. The government needs to
overcome a systemic lock-in and an absence of societal steering capacity in order to solve emerging societal problems. Part of
the solution lies in the emerging ontology that humans are collectively responsible for socio-ecological resilience and that they
should collectively adapt their sociotechnical systems towards sustainability.
Role perception of civil servants Within transformative government, civil servants see themselves as future-oriented system architects working with other
stakeholders. They are trained to think holistically and abductively, aligning social and environmental challenges. In matters of
giving direction to the transition, the civil service focuses on its complementarity with politics.
Characterization of legitimate
action
Legitimacy is found in the translation from supranational agreements to national and regional objectives and the
acknowledgement that governments need to take an assertive role in sustainability transitions. Future generations and natural
entities are recognized as having a rightful place in the negotiations.
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6. Conclusion
This paper set out to examine the extent to which the sociotechnical transitions literature and the PA literature align, in order to
uncover possible tensions and prepare a synthesis to legitimize the government’s role in sociotechnical transitions. We inductively
coded 100 TL articles on tasks assigned to the government. Five categories emerged: Give Direction, Create Governance, Support the
New, Destabilize the Unsustainable and Develop Internal Capabilities and Structures. We assessed these tasks against normative ar-
guments from the different PA traditions and found that at present, most of the transition tasks are not compatible with the PA tra-
ditions. The existing PA traditions give some interpretative exibility to civil servants to undertake transformative action, but when
clustered, each transition task is at variance with at least one PA tradition. To provide legitimation for the government’s role in societal
transition, we propose the development of transformative government as a new PA tradition. Transformative government must nd
ways to combine PA insights on legitimacy, public support and democracy, with the transition tasks recommended by the TL literature.
The contributions to the literature are threefold. First, this paper forms an addition to the TL literature by providing an overview of
the government’s transition tasks and identifying the problems of legitimation from a PA perspective. This analysis helps to understand
why the civil service may not adopt transition tasks that the TL deems urgent. Second, the paper presents a new normative framework –
transformative government – which extends the PA literature by providing an understanding of suggestions for the role of a democratic
government in societal transition. Third, the paper synthesizes the literature on TL and PA and highlights that such a synthesis is
needed to provide both an understanding of the new role of government in a societal transition and arguments for legitimizing this new
role.
There are also some limitations to this paper. Our analysis focuses on the take-off phase of a transition; although all the tasks that
we identied are relevant during the early and later stages of transition, some tasks (such as destabilizing the unsustainable) and their
legitimation become more prominent once a transition is further developed. Related to this, Kanger et al. (2020) address the broader
repercussions of regime stabilization, specically by providing support for the losers in a transition. We did not encounter such tasks in
our database, possibly because the transition literature focuses predominantly on the early stages of transition (Turnheim et al., 2018).
However, we endorse the necessity of this task and suggest adding ’providing support for the losers in transitions’ to ’destabilize the
unsustainable’ as an additional subcategory, for instance, by opening up avenues for rms with outdated business models.
Our proposal of a new tradition of transformative government in addition to the existing traditions of constitutional, discretionary
and collaborative government calls for further empirical and theoretical research. These new lines of thought should be validated with
empirics, such as interviews with civil servants and gray literature. We chose to perform this fundamental analysis based on the as-
sumptions and argumentation derived from generic PA literature. The new tradition could be further rened by means of a systematic
review of the PA literature on sociotechnical transitions.
The tradition of transformative government requires more normative elaboration. There is a need to rethink political processes,
citizen and stakeholder engagement, the connections between long-term and short-term interests, and new approaches for risk-taking,
and this requires new institutional arrangements. We identied the following three issues that need to be addressed to provide strong
legitimation for transformative government: the democratic basis for directionality, the risk of technocracy and the political-
administrative deciency. We contend that addressing these issues is a priority in order to realize a legitimate sociotechnical tran-
sition towards a more sustainable society.
Declaration of Competing Interest
The authors declare that they have no known competing nancial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to
inuence the work reported in this paper.
Acknowledgments
We are very grateful to the three anonymous reviewers, whose critical and constructive comments and suggestions have made a
huge improvement to our paper.
Appendix
Table 4
Aggregated criteria from comparative models of Stout (2013) and Torng and Triantallou (2016).
Aggregated criteria Three traditions of public administration praxis (Stout, 2013) Indicators comparing three governance paradigms (
Torng and Triantallou, 2016)
Problem-solution diagnosis Political ontology, Political authority and scope of action, Legitimacy
problems, Organizational style.
Problem diagnosis, Solution, Basic view of public
organizations and employees, Overall goal.
Role perception of civil
servants
The criterion of proper behavior, Assumed governance context,
Administrative role conception, Key role characteristics.
Role: politicians, managers, employees, rms and
NGO’s and citizens.
Characterization of
legitimate action
Source of legitimacy, Administrative decision-making rationality.
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Table 5
Transition tasks assessed with prepositions from Public Administration traditions (see Table 1). The numbers link to the numbered transition tasks in Table 2.
Category of transition
tasks
Constitutional tradition Discretionary tradition Collaborative tradition
Tasks
accepted
Hesitance
about the
tasks
Tasks Rejected Tasks
accepted
Hesitance
about the
tasks
Tasks Rejected Tasks accepted Hesitance
about the tasks
Tasks Rejected
1. Give
direction
8, 16 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 9, 10, 11,
12, 13, 14, 15, 17
16 7, 9 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 10, 11,
12, 13, 14, 15, 17
8, 16 6, 7 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 9, 10,
11, 12, 13, 14,
15, 17
2. Support
Governance
24 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 25,
26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32
18 19, 20, 21, 24 22, 23, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29,
30, 31, 32
18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 24,
25, 26, 28, 29, 30, 31,
32
27 23
3. Support
the new
36, 49 42, 45, 46 33, 34, 35, 37, 38, 39, 40,
41, 43, 44, 47, 48, 50, 51,
52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57
33, 36, 49 38, 42, 46 34, 35, 37 39, 40, 41, 43,
44, 45, 47, 48, 50, 51, 52,
53, 54, 55, 56, 57
33, 34, 35, 36, 39, 43,
45, 47, 48, 49, 50, 52,
53, 54, 55, 57
37, 38, 40, 41,
42, 46, 51, 56
44
4. Destabilize the
unsustainable
59, 64 58, 60, 61 62, 63 62 58, 59, 60, 61, 63, 64 63 59, 62, 64 58, 60, 61
5. Develop internal
capabilities and
structures
68, 75, 77,
79
66, 71, 80 65, 67, 69, 70, 72, 73, 74,
76, 78
67, 68, 69, 70,
72, 74, 75, 76
73, 77 65, 66, 71, 78, 79, 80 65, 67, 69, 70, 71, 72,
73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78
66, 68 79, 80
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