The politics of deliberate destabilisation for sustainability transitions

Highlights

• The political economy influences the politics and governance of deliberate destabilisation.

• The capitalist political economy influences the rationale, process and outcome of deliberate destabilisation. .

• The example of the phase-out of hen battery cages in the Netherlands illustrates our argument.

• Deliberate destabilisation may reproduce, rather than unsettle incumbencies in the political economy.

Abstract

This paper advances scholarship on deliberate destabilisation for sustainability transitions. To understand how deliberate destabilisation plays out in practice, the politics of such processes must be confronted. To this end, we bridge research on the political economy of sustainability transitions with recent theorisations of the deliberate destabilisation of unsustainable socio-technical regimes and propose a set of analytical dimensions and guiding questions for the study of the latter. The added value of a political economy perspective to understand the politics of deliberate destabilisation in capitalist economies is demonstrated through the historical example of the phase-out of hen battery cages in the Netherlands. The poultry sector in the Netherlands embodies an industrial approach to food and farming, orientated towards producing large amounts of standardised and cheap food. We foster new insights on the influence of intertwined political and economic interests for deliberate destabilisation processes, which may reproduce, rather than transform, unsustainable and unjust socio-technical regimes.