Andy Stirling
Biographic Data
| ID | 159092 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Andy Stirling |
| GIVEN NAMES | Andy |
| FAMILY NAME | Stirling |
| SIGNATURE | STIRLING A |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Sussex |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-0650-431X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 59 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1272 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 59 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1992 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 17 |
Making global environmental assessments fit for future challenges
Global environmental assessments (GEAs) provide authoritative expert knowledge on environmental issues for an international audience. Demand for GEAs is growing rapidly: their number is increasing, and their thematic scope continually expands. At the same time, the environmental, social, and political context in which GEAs operate has changed dramatically over their 50-year history. Anthropogenic environmental problems have worsened significantly…
Building (and breaking) ties: Explaining local relationships in grassroots place-making
This paper explores the factors that shape relationships between grassroots innovation initiatives and other actors in local sustainability transitions contexts. Building such ties with wider communities is crucial to the local effectiveness of grassroots innovation, yet in practice these relationships can be distant and strained. Despite its importance, reasons for this practical problem are insufficiently understood in the literature on grassro…
Modern worldmaking and the 21st century colonial genocide in Gaza
Commonplace analyses of responsibility for Israel’s genocide against Gaza come in concentric circles. In the innermost circle, responsibility is attributed to Israel’s ruling politicians. The circle is widened to include the Israeli military, its settler-colonial political culture, the US’s massive military aid, and (most broadly) Western imperialism and racial capitalism. Extending the latter analyses, we situate this genocide in the globally he…
Decolonising innovation in sustainability transitions for pluriversal justice and wellbeing
Describes epistemological and ontological foundations of colonial-modern patterns of innovation that are dominant today; • Proposes decolonial transformations of modernity’s ‘one-world’ innovation processes; • Articulates pluriversal justice with decolonisation of modern innovation processes. Sustainability scholars address social-ecological injustices associated with innovation processes, through concepts such as ‘just transitions’ and ‘energy j…
Topology beyond application: Drawing social and mathematical worlds into rhythm
For more than sixty years, topology has provided geographers with tools for lifting the veils of Euclideanism and showing how spaces are relational, agential, embodied, and ontologically multiple. A field of mathematics since the nineteenth century, topology has been reworked and mobilised by geographers in diverse ways: from spatial science, through networks and assemblages, to the influences of Law and Mol, Deleuze and Guattari, Agamben, Barad,…
Energi i endring
Kollektivt koreograferte bevegelser, som en fugleflokk eller fiskestim, gir inspirasjon til arbeidet for energiomstilling
Colonial modernity in the anthroposalon
Responsibility and the hidden politics of directionality: Opening up ‘innovation democracies’ for sustainability transformations
Developing earlier work, this paper explores analytic and political implications of ideas about direction in innovation . Unduly hidden in mainstream innovation and sustainability transformations literatures, crucial issues arise for responsible innovation. Although essential to both rigour and effectiveness, key realities tend to be concealed by general hegemonic forces in contemporary global colonial modernity, as well as by more specific exped…
Bring digital twins back to Earth
We reflect on the development of digital twins of the Earth, which we associate with a reductionist view of nature as a machine. The projects of digital twins deviate from contemporary scientific paradigms in the treatment of complexity and uncertainty, and does not engage with critical and interpretative social sciences. We contest the utility of digital twins for addressing climate change issues and discuss societal risks associated with the co…
Transforming imaginations? Multiple dimensionalities and temporalities as vital complexities in transformations to sustainability
Through interlinked theoretical and empirical analysis, this paper explores some important but neglected questions concerning efforts to achieve sustainability. To what extents do currently dominant forms of academic study and policy visions in this field, satisfactorily address the full political depth and scope of vital complexities in pathways for emerging social transformations? Are there dangers that common simplifications in mainstream ways…
Colonial modernity and sustainability transitions: A conceptualisation in six dimensions
Through European colonialisms spanning five centuries, coloniality – as intersectional stratification and violence directed against ‘other worlds’ – has been central to the making of modern societies worldwide. However, these colonial modernities are very rarely addressed within studies on sustainability transitions. This dearth of attention means that transitions scholars risk failing to challenge the reproduction of colonially accumulated power…
Going through the dance steps’: Instrumentality, frustration and performativity in processes of formal public participation in decision-making on shale development in the United Kingdom
We employ a mixed-method approach to analyse four forms of formal public participation in decision-making on shale development in the UK – planning, environmental permitting, public consultation and dialogue workshops. We focus analytically on the kinds of issues that can be raised effectively in such processes and the scope for public influence. This focus is conceptually inspired by literatures on public participation from Science and Technolog…
Imagining urban transformation in Kenya
This paper examines the diverse ways in which science and technology are implicated in collective imaginations of urban futures in Kenya. Despite calls for a ‘deep reimagining’ of African urbanisation (UN Habitat 2014), globalised narratives of urban ‘smartness’ are intersecting with pan-African tendencies toward top-down Master Planning to constrain spaces for collective imagining of urban futures. Using the conceptual lens of sociotechnical ima…
The genetically modified organism shall not be refused? Talking back to the technosciences
Starting from Marcel Mauss' observation that "one has no right to refuse a gift", this paper explores the politics of refusal in the context of field trials with genetically modified organisms in Flanders (Belgium). Based on a decade of activist research, and focusing on the genetically modified organism field trials of the Flemish Institute for Biotechnology, we show that the business model of this strategic research center - with its triple mis…
Three Decades of Climate Mitigation: Why Haven't We Bent the Global Emissions Curve?
Despite three decades of political efforts and a wealth of research on the causes and catastrophic impacts of climate change, global carbon dioxide emissions have continued to rise and are 60% higher today than they were in 1990. Exploring this rise through nine thematic lenses—covering issues of climate governance, the fossil fuel industry, geopolitics, economics, mitigation modeling, energy systems, inequity, lifestyles, and social imaginaries—…
The governance of sociotechnical transformations to sustainability
The contribution makes use of a sociotechnical imaginaries (STI) framework to expose crucial but neglected governance issues in sociotechnical areas of key relevance to sustainability transformations such as energy systems. It explores how the STI concept can contribute to understanding transformations to sustainability (T2S) by illustrating their multidimensionality and temporality. It takes as its starting point a ‘co-productionist’ view illumi…
The Politics of Uncertainty: Challenges of Transformation
Amid the proliferating uncertainties of globalised modernity, development institutions have deployed insurance to transfer risk across more geographic and hazard domains. This chapter first explores why insurance and other risk transfer tools are increasingly popular responses in development practice. It then argues that this embrace can paradoxically proliferate uncertainties when insurance contracts fail to pay out, illustrated with reference t…
Five ways to ensure that models serve society: A manifesto
Transformations to sustainability: Combining structural, systemic and enabling approaches
Sociotechnical agendas: Reviewing future directions for energy and climate research
The field of science and technology studies (STS) has introduced and developed a “sociotechnical” perspective that has been taken up by many disciplines and areas of inquiry. The aims and objectives of this study are threefold: to interrogate which sociotechnical concepts or tools from STS are useful at better understanding energy-related social science, to reflect on prominent themes and topics within those approaches, and to identify current re…
How deep is incumbency? A ‘configuring fields’ approach to redistributing and reorienting power in socio-material change
Comparing nuclear trajectories in Germany and the United Kingdom: From regimes to democracies in sociotechnical transitions and discontinuities
Waves of disruption in clean energy transitions: Sociotechnical dimensions of system disruption in Germany and the United Kingdom
Academic and policy literatures are seeing a growing discussion about ‘clean energy disruption’. However, the term disruption often lacks definitional clarity. Departing from the concept of disruptive innovation and based on a review of firm-based management and socio-technical transitions literatures, we derive four dimensions of system disruption: technology, markets and business models, ownership and actors, and regulation. We apply these dime…
Collingridge and the dilemma of control: Towards responsible and accountable innovation
The paper critically reviews the work of David Collingridge in the light of contemporary concerns about responsibility and accountability in innovation, public engagement with science and technology, and the role of scientific expertise in technology policy. Given continued interest in his thoughts on the ‘social control of technology’, and the ‘dilemma of control’, this attention is both timely and overdue. The paper illuminates a mismatch betwe…
Companion to Environmental Studies
Opening Up" and "Closing Down: Power, Participation, and Pluralism in the Social Appraisal of Technology
Discursive deference in the governance of science and technology is rebalancing from expert analysis toward participatory deliberation. Linear, scientistic conceptions of innovation are giving ground to more plural, socially situated understandings. Yet, growing recognition of social agency in technology choice is countered by persistently deterministic notions of technological progress. This article addresses this increasingly stark disjuncture.…
Sociotechnical agendas: Reviewing future directions for energy and climate research
The field of science and technology studies (STS) has introduced and developed a “sociotechnical” perspective that has been taken up by many disciplines and areas of inquiry. The aims and objectives of this study are threefold: to interrogate which sociotechnical concepts or tools from STS are useful at better understanding energy-related social science, to reflect on prominent themes and topics within those approaches, and to identify current re…
Pluralising progress: From integrative transitions to transformative diversity
Transforming power: Social science and the politics of energy choices
This paper addresses key implications in momentous current global energy choices – both for social science and for society. Energy can be over-used as a lens for viewing social processes. But it is nonetheless of profound importance. Understanding possible ‘sustainable energy’ transformations requires attention to many tricky issues in social theory: around agency and structure and the interplay of power, contingency and practice. These factors a…
Transformations to sustainability: Combining structural, systemic and enabling approaches
The Politics of Social-ecological Resilience and Sustainable Socio-technical Transitions
Technology-focused literature on socio-technical transitions shares some of the complex systems sensibilities of social-ecological systems research. We contend that the sharing of lessons between these areas of study must attend particularly to the common governance challenges that confront both approaches. Here, we focus on critical experience arising from reactions to a transition management approach to governing sustainable socio-technical tra…
Governing epidemics in an age of complexity: Narratives, politics and pathways to sustainability
How deep is incumbency? A ‘configuring fields’ approach to redistributing and reorienting power in socio-material change
Analysis, participation and power: Justification and closure in participatory multi-criteria analysis
Policy mixes for incumbency: Exploring the destructive recreation of renewable energy, shale gas ‘fracking,’ and nuclear power in the United Kingdom
The notion of a ‘policy mix’ can describe interactions across a wide range of innovation policies, including ‘motors for creation’ as well as for ‘destruction’. This paper focuses on the United Kingdom’s (UK) ‘new policy direction’ that has weakened support for renewables and energy efficiency schemes while strengthening promotion of nuclear power and hydraulic fracturing for natural gas (‘fracking’). The paper argues that a ‘policy apparatus for…
The governance of sociotechnical transformations to sustainability
The contribution makes use of a sociotechnical imaginaries (STI) framework to expose crucial but neglected governance issues in sociotechnical areas of key relevance to sustainability transformations such as energy systems. It explores how the STI concept can contribute to understanding transformations to sustainability (T2S) by illustrating their multidimensionality and temporality. It takes as its starting point a ‘co-productionist’ view illumi…
Colonial modernity and sustainability transitions: A conceptualisation in six dimensions
Through European colonialisms spanning five centuries, coloniality – as intersectional stratification and violence directed against ‘other worlds’ – has been central to the making of modern societies worldwide. However, these colonial modernities are very rarely addressed within studies on sustainability transitions. This dearth of attention means that transitions scholars risk failing to challenge the reproduction of colonially accumulated power…
Maintaining planetary systems’ or ‘concentrating global power?’ High stakes in contending framings of climate geoengineering
Waves of disruption in clean energy transitions: Sociotechnical dimensions of system disruption in Germany and the United Kingdom
Academic and policy literatures are seeing a growing discussion about ‘clean energy disruption’. However, the term disruption often lacks definitional clarity. Departing from the concept of disruptive innovation and based on a review of firm-based management and socio-technical transitions literatures, we derive four dimensions of system disruption: technology, markets and business models, ownership and actors, and regulation. We apply these dime…
Transforming Innovation for Sustainability
Leach, M., J. Rockström, P. Raskin, I. Scoones, A. C. Stirling, A. Smith, J. Thompson, E. Millstone, A. Ely, E. Arond, C. Folke, and P. Olsson. 2012. Transforming innovation for sustainability. Ecology and Society 17(2): 11. https://doi.org/10.5751/ES-04933-170211
Comparing nuclear trajectories in Germany and the United Kingdom: From regimes to democracies in sociotechnical transitions and discontinuities
Sustaining trajectories towards Sustainability: Dynamics and diversity in UK communal growing activities
Deliberate futures: Precaution and progress in social choice of sustainable technology
There is much high profile concern over apparent tensions between sustainability and precaution on the one hand, and ‘competitive innovation’ and ‘technological progress’ on the other. How can we balance risk with opportunity and public engagement with ‘sound science’? The outcomes of such debates may undoubtedly be serious for particular technologies, but are there really grounds for concern over the implications for innovation in general? This …
Unpacking sustainabilities in diverse transition contexts: Solar photovoltaic and urban mobility experiments in India and Thailand
It is generally accepted that the concept of sustainability is not straightforward, but is subject to ongoing ambiguities, uncertainties and contestations. Yet literature on sustainability transitions has so far only engaged in limited ways with the resulting tough questions around what sustainability means, to whom and in which contexts. This paper makes a contribution to this debate by unpacking sustainability in India and Thailand in the conte…
Precautionary Risk Regulation in European Governance
This paper develops a sequential model of precautionary risk regulation that contributes substantively and procedurally to the European Commission's position on precaution. At first, four concepts of precautionary policy are distinguished which are taken into account in the conceptualisation of the precautionary risk regulation. The paper then expounds the four key challenges of characterising, evaluating and managing risks: these are seriousness…
Risk at a turning point
There is increasing recognition in comparative risk assessment of the intrinsic subjectivity of fundamental framing assumptions and the consequent necessity for active participation in analysis by all interested and affected parties. Despite this, there remains considerable inertia in the implementation of these insights in formal policy making and regulatory procedures on risk. Here, the issue seems as often to be seen as a need for better 'comm…
Transforming imaginations? Multiple dimensionalities and temporalities as vital complexities in transformations to sustainability
Through interlinked theoretical and empirical analysis, this paper explores some important but neglected questions concerning efforts to achieve sustainability. To what extents do currently dominant forms of academic study and policy visions in this field, satisfactorily address the full political depth and scope of vital complexities in pathways for emerging social transformations? Are there dangers that common simplifications in mainstream ways…
Finding a Precautionary Approach to Technological Developments – Lessons for the Evaluation of GM Crops
The earthscan reader in environmental economics
Regulating the electricity supply industry by valuing environmental effects
Regulating the electricity supply industry by valuing environmental effects
The earthscan reader in environmental economics
Valuation—whose hand on the dial
Risk at a turning point
There is increasing recognition in comparative risk assessment of the intrinsic subjectivity of fundamental framing assumptions and the consequent necessity for active participation in analysis by all interested and affected parties. Despite this, there remains considerable inertia in the implementation of these insights in formal policy making and regulatory procedures on risk. Here, the issue seems as often to be seen as a need for better 'comm…
A Novel Approach to the Appraisal of Technological Risk: A Multicriteria Mapping Study of a Genetically Modified Crop
The recent controversy over genetically modified (GM) foods amply demonstrates the general difficulties encountered in the social appraisal of technological risk. Existing procedures for regulatory appraisal neglect many possible forms of impact and routinely exclude important cultural and social dimensions of risk. A narrow, expert, ‘science-based’ approach is now widely acknowledged to be insufficient. There is a need for new approaches that ar…
Finding a Precautionary Approach to Technological Developments – Lessons for the Evaluation of GM Crops
The governance of sustainable socio-technical transitions
Precautionary Risk Regulation in European Governance
This paper develops a sequential model of precautionary risk regulation that contributes substantively and procedurally to the European Commission's position on precaution. At first, four concepts of precautionary policy are distinguished which are taken into account in the conceptualisation of the precautionary risk regulation. The paper then expounds the four key challenges of characterising, evaluating and managing risks: these are seriousness…
Analysis, participation and power: Justification and closure in participatory multi-criteria analysis
Moving Outside or Inside? Objectification and Reflexivity in the Governance of Socio-Technical Systems
Two contrasting, ideal-typical conceptualizations of the relations between governance and socio-technical change are developed, based on different considerations of the roles and links between social appraisal and social commitment in governance. ‘Governance on the outside’ objectifies the socio-technical and is managerial in approach. ‘Governance on the inside’ is more reflexive about the role of governance in co-constituting the socio-technical…
Risk, precaution and science: towards a more constructive policy debate: Talking point on the precautionary principle
A general framework for analysing diversity in science, technology and society
This paper addresses the scope for more integrated general analysis of diversity in science, technology and society. It proposes a framework recognizing three necessary but individually insufficient properties of diversity. Based on 10 quality criteria, it suggests a general quantitative non-parametric diversity heuristic. This allows the systematic exploration of diversity under different perspectives, including divergent conceptions of relevant…
Deliberative mapping: A novel analytic-deliberative methodology to support contested science-policy decisions
This paper discusses the methodological development of Deliberative Mapping (DM), a participatory, multi-criteria, option appraisal process that combines a novel approach to the use of quantitative decision analysis techniques with some significant innovations in the field of participatory deliberation. DM is a symmetrical process, engaging “specialists” and “citizens” in the same appraisal process, providing for consistency of framing, mutual in…
Deliberate futures: Precaution and progress in social choice of sustainable technology
There is much high profile concern over apparent tensions between sustainability and precaution on the one hand, and ‘competitive innovation’ and ‘technological progress’ on the other. How can we balance risk with opportunity and public engagement with ‘sound science’? The outcomes of such debates may undoubtedly be serious for particular technologies, but are there really grounds for concern over the implications for innovation in general? This …
Opening Up" and "Closing Down: Power, Participation, and Pluralism in the Social Appraisal of Technology
Discursive deference in the governance of science and technology is rebalancing from expert analysis toward participatory deliberation. Linear, scientistic conceptions of innovation are giving ground to more plural, socially situated understandings. Yet, growing recognition of social agency in technology choice is countered by persistently deterministic notions of technological progress. This article addresses this increasingly stark disjuncture.…
From Risk Assessment to Knowledge Mapping: Science, Precaution, and Participation in Disease Ecology
Stirling, A. C., and I. Scoones. 2009. From risk assessment to knowledge mapping: science, precaution and participation in disease ecology. Ecology and Society 14(2): 14. https://doi.org/10.5751/ES-02980-140214
Dynamic Sustainabilities: Technology, Environment, Social Justice
Linking environmental sustainability with poverty reduction and social justice, and making science and technology work for the poor, have become central practical, political and moral challenges of our times. These must be met in a world of rapid, interconnected change in environments, societies and economies, and globalised, fragmented governance arrangements. Yet despite growing international attention and investment, policy attempts often fail…
Keep it complex
Governing epidemics in an age of complexity: Narratives, politics and pathways to sustainability
A New Manifesto for Innovation, Sustainability and Development – Response to Rhodes and Sulston
The Politics of Social-ecological Resilience and Sustainable Socio-technical Transitions
Technology-focused literature on socio-technical transitions shares some of the complex systems sensibilities of social-ecological systems research. We contend that the sharing of lessons between these areas of study must attend particularly to the common governance challenges that confront both approaches. Here, we focus on critical experience arising from reactions to a transition management approach to governing sustainable socio-technical tra…
Pluralising progress: From integrative transitions to transformative diversity
Pathways to Sustainability: Perspectives and Provocations
There is no abstract for this paper
How journal rankings can suppress interdisciplinary research: A comparison between Innovation Studies and Business & Management
Transforming Innovation for Sustainability
Leach, M., J. Rockström, P. Raskin, I. Scoones, A. C. Stirling, A. Smith, J. Thompson, E. Millstone, A. Ely, E. Arond, C. Folke, and P. Olsson. 2012. Transforming innovation for sustainability. Ecology and Society 17(2): 11. https://doi.org/10.5751/ES-04933-170211
Political science (39 works) · Sociology (30 works) · Economics (29 works) · Politics (26 works) · Sustainability and Climate Change Governance (24 works) · Computer Science (23 works) · Epistemology (18 works) · Law (18 works) · Engineering (16 works) · Ecology (14 works)