Our current economic system operates on a fundamental logic of short-term profit maximization that drives unsustainable behaviour and accelerates resource depletion and climate crisis*. In this project, we have identified the key barriers preventing businesses and society from making genuine leaps toward sustainable and circular business models.​This research project aims to visualize how our economic and financial systems work today, identify and understand phenomena that make change difficult, and identify the most effective leverage points where policy can ways to drive transformative innovation. Through extensive stakeholder engagement with business leaders, finance professionals, policymakers, public sector representatives, and civil society, and with complements from literature, we’ve developed a comprehensive map of levers to stimulate change towards a sustainable system. The hope is that the results- empowered by visualizations- will contribute to transformative policymaking that creates a sustainable, safe, and sound economy operating within planetary boundaries - the environmental limits within which humanity can safely thrive.​

Our current economic system poses a threat to humanity. The project presented here mapped how current economic systems function, why they resist change, and identifies key policy leverage points through stakeholder collaboration. The objective is to promote transformative policies that establish a sustainable economy within Earth's environmental limits. ​

Governments increasingly launch transformative policy missions to address complex societal challenges such as climate change. While the literature on mission-oriented innovation policy highlights the role of stakeholder contestation and emphasizes the need to promote alignment, it often overlooks the nature of underlying disagreements. This paper distinguishes between factual and normative disagreement across problems, solutions, and interventions, and applies Q methodology to identify and analyze four distinct stakeholder narratives in the mission to decarbonize Swedish industry. The narratives reveal different varieties of disagreement, ranging from factual concerns about technological feasibility and policy effectiveness to normative critiques of directionality and legitimacy. Our findings demonstrate that missions involve not only alignment, but also disjointment – persistent divergences of opinion rooted in fundamentally conflicting values and beliefs. Recognizing disjointment underscores the need for mission-oriented policymaking to balance efforts to foster alignment with strategies that address enduring conflict through mediation, recognition, redistribution, and compensation

This paper explores how new technology-based firms innovate their business models in a dynamic transitions context. Through a case study of emerging biotech firms in the European biomass and precision fermentation industries, we analyze how firms adopt fit-and-conform and stretch-andtransform approaches to the malleable boundaries of a multi-dimensional business model design space. Conceptually, our study advances this analytical framework by integrating an ecological dimension, offering a broader socio-techno-ecological perspective on business model innovation. Empirically, we find that firms stretch-and-transform the ecological boundary through circular value delivery practices. We also find that firms fit-and-conform to the markets & users boundary by focusing on low-cost value propositions. In addition, we find that technological and business model innovation are deeply interconnected, challenging prior business model design space studies treating them as more distinct. The paper adds to a growing literature that integrates firm- and system-level perspectives on sustainability transitions.

As the effects of climate change become increasingly evident, there is a pressing need to fundamentally transform our societies towards just and sustainable futures. This paper presents a practical methodology for guiding collaborative transformation processes towards sustainability. Our aim is to contribute to the development of tools that combine insights from foresight with theories from the sustainability transitions literature, specifically scenario planning and multi-level perspective (MLP) approaches. Foresight and sustainability transitions both aim to understand long-term trends shaping production and consumption systems and guide transitions to more desirable socio-technical regimes. However, few scholars have examined overlaps between the fields and explored the potential for practical integration in workshop settings. The MLP can benefit from scenario planning by incorporating directionality and pluralism of futures in transition processes, while the MLP provides a structure for understanding system dynamics and socio-technical change to scenario planning. In this paper, we share our experiences using an integrated MLP-scenario planning framework in a workshop setting where actors from the Swedish food system explored prospective transitions. Using backcasting and pre-mortem related to regime dimensions from the MLP, participants built a common understanding of events, barriers and pathways associated with four normative scenarios of sustainable food systems. Our results show that the MLP and scenario planning can be integrated and implemented on a practical level to facilitate dialogues on current regime lock-ins and thereby pave the way for transformative change

ustainability challenges call for a shift towards plant-based proteins. This paper aims to analyze the development of plant-based meat alternatives in Sweden with a focus on legitimation processes. We divide legitimation into cognitive, normative, pragmatic and regulative varieties, and argue that configurations of legitimacy shape the directionality of innovation. We integrate this conceptualization into an analytical framework based on the technological innovation systems approach and analyze data from 41 interviews and multiple secondary sources. The analysis shows that the development of plant-based meat alternatives has been driven by a supportive configuration of strong normative legitimacy for low climate impact, increasing cognitive legitimacy based on associations with meat-based diets, increasing pragmatic legitimacy ensuring profitability for producers and convenience for consumers, and low regulative legitimacy due to weak policy support. This has shaped directionality towards the development of highly refined products that mimic meat, rather than towards simpler plant-based products, which may bring sustainability benefits but require more substantial behavioral change. Our findings suggest that policymakers can influence all four kinds of legitimacy, but have an especially important role in actively targeting regulative legitimacy. Other stakeholders can shape cognitive, normative, and pragmatic legitimacy to propel plant-based meat alternatives in desired direction.

Recent geopolitical and economic crises underline the need for a European transition towards a more sustainable food system. Scholars and policymakers have called for a re-territorialization of food production to strike a better balance between local, regional and global value chains. This paper explores the role of re-territorialization through an analysis of the emergence, development and current transformation of the Swedish wild berry value chain. The analysis combines the multi-level perspective on sustainability transitions with a socio-techno-ecological system approach and draws on interviews, informal conversations, participant observations and a range of secondary sources. The resulting case narrative shows how processes of de-territorialization may result in regimes that fail to address sustainability potential and problems. It also highlights that processes of re-territorialization challenge established regimes by promoting niches that represent diferent, albeit complementary, value chain confgurations. Apart from a rich empirical narrative that brings useful knowledge to stakeholders to the Swedish wild berry value chain, the paper contributes to the theoretical understanding re-territorialization, shows how the ecological dimension can be accounted for with the multi-level perspective on sustainability transitions and presents a number of general policy implications.