Sustainability Transitions Antenarratives: Public Sector Organization Perspectives in Implementing Sustainability Oriented Projects in a Developing Country

Sammanfattning

Sustainability has been considered a novel research field emerging from the desire to protect the environment, and equally emerging in transition discourses. This research explores the construction of sustainability transition processes and pathways in a public sector organization implementing a sustainability oriented program. The study takes on an explorative, qualitative longitudinal approach. Through antenarrative inquiry, analysis is made on the stories and discussions as a reflexive way in expressing experiences and by giving meaning to these experiences. Assessed within sustainability transition theories, processes and pathways emerge from socio-technical transitions and its micro-foundations. Results indicate that pathways of transition exist in socio-technical systems, socio-political systems, socio-institutional systems and in socio-ecological systems as achored in public sector processes. The narrative character and sustainability formations potray inclusivity of actors, continuity and gradual transition processes. It is therefore opined that sustainability oriented programs and projects implemented in developing nations by the public sector have the ability to enable niche level changes by creating necessary momentum at the micro-foundations required to distabilize dominant regimes. Methodoligally, antenarratives provide an avenue for prospective sensemaking necessary in prospected and wholistic sustainability transitions.