Derk A Loorbach

Biographic Data

ID	3080425
NAME	Derk A Loorbach
GIVEN NAMES	Derk A
FAMILY NAME	Loorbach
SIGNATURE	LOORBACH D A
AFFILIATIONS	Erasmus University Rotterdam
ORCID	0000-0002-4422-0019
VERIFIED	Yes
TOTAL WORKS	45
TOTAL CITATIONS	1099
AUTHOR COUNT	45
EDITOR COUNT	0
FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR	2005
LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR	2025
H-INDEX	13

Repairing urban water governance through informality: Comparing governance capacities for reparation in Indian cities
Open AccessNeha Mungekar, Katharina Hölscher et al.ARTICLEWater Policy2025
Addressing water challenges in resource-constrained ‘Southern’ cities requires ‘reparation’, a transformative governance approach rooted in restorative justice. In India, formal governance often struggles to tackle social stratification and colonial legacies effectively, sometimes even reinforcing them. This study compares how informality can foster reparative transformation towards the water-sensitive city approach, further referred to as ‘water…
Transformative Tensions in the Ivory Tower: Learning from DRIFT's Institutional Journey Within Erasmus University Rotterdam, The Netherlands
Open AccessDerk A Loorbach, Julia M WittmayerARTICLEMinerva2025Cited by: 1References: 8
For universities to move towards positive societal impact and take a leading role in societal challenges, they need to address the fundamental institutional barriers against transformative forms of academic work. While current institutional experiments are often conceived from within the current logic of (public) academic institutions, this paper focuses on an organization that developed based on a transdisciplinary and transformative logic, the …
Nurturing transformative spaces to challenge technocratic hegemony: Leveraging informality in Indian cities
Open AccessNeha Mungekar, Annelli Janssen et al.ARTICLEAction Research2025References: 3
Urban water governance in India is dominated by engineering-centric, hierarchical systems that marginalise non-technocratic knowledge. We introduce a novel approach in conceptualising and operationalising transformative spaces that leverage informality—characterised by flexibility, adaptability, and creativity—to disrupt these hegemonies and promote culturally situated collaboration. These transformative spaces function as ‘safe-enough’ environme…
From commodity to commons: Understanding the transformative potential of mobility cooperatives for just sustainability transitions
Open AccessEmil Beemer, Gijs Diercks et al.ARTICLEEnvironmental Innovation and…2025Cited by: 1References: 44
Neither right nor wrong? Ethics of collaboration in transformative research for sustainable futures
Open AccessJulia M Wittmayer, Ying-Syuan Huang et al.ARTICLEHumanities and Social Sciences…2024
Transformative research is a broad and loosely connected family of research disciplines and approaches, with the explicit normative ambition to fundamentally question the status quo, change the dominant structures, and support just sustainability transitions by working collaboratively with society. When engaging in such science-practice collaborations for transformative change in society, researchers experience ethical dilemmas. Amongst others, t…
Transforming universities: Mobilizing research and education for sustainability transitions at Erasmus University Rotterdam, The Netherlands
Open AccessDerk A Loorbach, Julia M WittmayerARTICLESustainability Science2023Cited by: 4References: 11
The dominant model of universities, especially in the social sciences, is often based upon academic disciplines, objectivity, and a linear knowledge-transfer model. It facilitates competition between academics, educating students for specific professions from an objective, descriptive, and neutral position. This paper argues that this institutional model of universities is inadequate to contribute effectively to societal transitions towards just …
How to account for the dark sides of social innovation? Transitions directionality in renewable energy prosumerism
Open AccessBonno Pel, Julia M Wittmayer et al.ARTICLEEnvironmental Innovation and…2023Cited by: 9References: 106
Social innovation is gaining attention as a pivotal dimension of socio-technical transitions with renewable energy prosumerism as a prominent example. However, this example also highlights that social innovation evokes concerns about purposes, beneficiaries, normative dilemmas and legitimacy. This paper addresses recent calls to confront the perceived 'dark sides' of social innovations. As debates on these dark sides often get stuck in either nai…
Exploring the interplay between technological decline and deinstitutionalisation in sustainability transitions
Open AccessWikke Novalia, Stephen McGrail et al.ARTICLETechnological Forecasting and…2022
Designing radical transitions: A plea for a new governance culture to empower deep transformative change
Open AccessDerk A LoorbachARTICLECity, Territory and Architecture2022
This explorative paper introduces the idea of radical transitions as a necessary starting point for policy and governance. The urgency to achieve transformative change facing climate change and biodiversity loss is now broadly shared, but the dominant policy and market logics of innovation, optimization and risk management persist. In for example the urban mobility transition, we do see a technological shift towards electric mobility but not auto…
Beyond technology: A research agenda for social sciences and humanities research on renewable energy in Europe
Open AccessSeweryn Krupnik, Aleksandra Wagner et al.ARTICLEEnergy Research & Social Science2022Cited by: 24References: 4
This article enriches the existing literature on the importance and role of the social sciences and humanities (SSH) in renewable energy sources research by providing a novel approach to instigating the future research agenda in this field. Employing a series of in-depth interviews, deliberative focus group workshops and a systematic horizon scanning process, which utilised the expert knowledge of 85 researchers from the field with diverse discip…
An actionable understanding of societal transitions: The X-curve framework
Open AccessAniek Hebinck, Gijs Diercks et al.ARTICLESustainability Science2022Cited by: 21References: 15
The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11625-021-01084-w
Entering, enduring and exiting: The Durability of Shared Mobility Arrangements and Habits
Open AccessBrendan J Doody, Tim Schwanen et al.ARTICLEMobilities2022Cited by: 5References: 40
Car sharing could support a transition away from private vehicle ownership and use. Attempts to understand participation in car sharing have primarily focused on minor and major disruptions which catalyse change in practices. This paper examines how processes of entering, continuing or exiting car sharing systems unfold in Norway, the Netherlands, Sweden and the UK. Car sharing is conceptualised as an arrangement of elements assembled, adjusted a…
Addressing perinatal health inequities in Dutch municipalities: Protocol for the Healthy Pregnancy 4 All-3 programme
Open AccessLisa S Barsties, Leonie A Daalderop et al.ARTICLEHealth Policy2021
BACKGROUND: Health inequities are already present at birth and affect individuals' health and socioeconomic outcomes across the life course. Addressing these inequities requires a cross-sectoral approach, covering the first 1,000 days of life. We believe that - in the Dutch context - municipal governments can be the main responsible actor to drive such an approach, since they are primarily responsible for organising adequate public health. Theref…
When top-down meets bottom-up: Is there a collaborative business model for local energy storage
Open AccessAntonia Proka, M Hisschemöller et al.ARTICLEEnergy Research & Social Science2020Cited by: 1References: 7
As the energy transition progresses, energy storage becomes increasingly important for safeguarding a reliable energy provision. At the same time, energy storage systems are used to increase the self-consumption of decentralised generation and are expected to result in lower electricity bills for the energy prosumers. Drawing on sustainability transitions and management literature, this contribution focuses on a neighbourhood battery with the aim…
Transformative innovation and translocal diffusion
Open AccessDerk Loorbach, Derk A Loorbach et al.ARTICLEEnvironmental Innovation and…2020Cited by: 92References: 58
Tales of transforming cities: Transformative climate governance capacities in New York City, U.S. and Rotterdam, Netherlands
Open AccessKatharina Hölscher, Niki Frantzeskaki et al.ARTICLEJournal of Environmental Management2019
Steering transformations under climate change: Capacities for transformative climate governance and the case of Rotterdam, the Netherlands
Open AccessKatharina Hölscher, Niki Frantzeskaki et al.ARTICLERegional Environmental Change2019
In light of the persistent failure to reduce emissions decisively, facilitate long-term resilience against climate change and account for the connectedness of climate change with other social, environmental and economic concerns, we present a conceptual framework of capacities for transformative climate governance. Transformative climate governance enables climate mitigation and adaptation while purposefully steering societies towards low-carbon,…
Capacities for urban transformations governance and the case of New York City
Open AccessKatharina Hölscher, Niki Frantzeskaki et al.ARTICLECities2019Cited by: 9References: 77
Co-Creation Dynamics in Urban Living Labs
Open AccessEmma Puerari, Jotte de Koning et al.ARTICLESustainability2018
Citizens and urban policy makers are experimenting with collaborative ways to tackle wicked urban issues, such as today’s sustainability challenges. In this article, we consider one particular way of collaboration in an experimental setting: Urban Living Labs (ULLs). ULLs are understood as spatially embedded sites for the co-creation of knowledge and solutions by conducting local experiments. As such, ULLs are supposed to offer an arena for refle…
Jointly Experimenting for Transformation? Shaping Real-World Laboratories by Comparing Them
Open AccessN Schäpke, Franziska Stelzer et al.ARTICLEGAIA - Ecological Perspectives…2018
Various experimental approaches of transformative research in real-world settings have emerged. Yet, similarities, differences, and specific contributions remain unclear. A characteristic-based comparison reveals complementarities and provides orientation.Real-world laboratories (RwLs, German Reallabore ) belong to a family of increasingly popular experimental and transdisciplinary research approaches at the science-society interface. As these ap…
Transition versus transformation: What’s the difference
Open AccessKatharina Hölscher, Julia M Wittmayer et al.ARTICLEEnvironmental Innovation and…2018Cited by: 107References: 11
Sustainability Transitions Research: Transforming Science and Practice for Societal Change
Open AccessDerk Loorbach, Derk A Loorbach et al.ARTICLEAnnual Review of Environment and…2017
The article describes the field of sustainability transitions research, which emerged in the past two decades in the context of a growing scientific and public interest in large-scale societal transformation toward sustainability. We describe how different scientific approaches and methodological positions explore diverse types of transitions and provide the basis for multiple theories and models for governance of sustainability transitions. We d…
Learning through evaluation – A tentative evaluative scheme for sustainability transition experiments
Open AccessChristopher Luederitz, N Schäpke et al.ARTICLEJournal of Cleaner Production2017
Actor roles in transition: Insights from sociological perspectives
Open AccessJulia M Wittmayer, Flor Avelino et al.ARTICLEEnvironmental Innovation and…2017Cited by: 96References: 48
To date, the field of transition research lacks a suitable vocabulary to analyse the (changing) interactions and relations of actors as part of a sustainability transition. This article addresses this knowledge gap by exploring the potential of the concept of \\'roles\\' from social interaction research. The role concept is operationalized for transition research to allow the analysis of (changing) roles and relations between actor roles as indic…
Governance of Urban Sustainability Transitions: European and Asian Experiences
Derk A Loorbach, Derk Loorbach et al.BOOKGovernance of Urban Sustainability…2016