So many ways out! Explorations into the existence of destabilisation as a research problem beyond the domain of transitions studies.

Résumé En

Destabilisation, decline, phase-out, discontinuation, collapse, dismantling, rolling back, failure, ends of, losses,… Depressing as it may seem, attention to such processes that carry negative connotations is growing within transitions studies (Rosenbloom and Rinscheid 2020), and in the world-at-large as means for addressing systemic environmental issues (Rinscheid et al 2022). In fact, it is an exciting prospect, because it signals an increasing focus on the processes by which undesirable system lock-ins may be overturned, and brings new questions to bear on transitions challenges such as issues of power and incumbencies (Stirling 2019).The wealth of such enquiries is evidenced by the multiplicity of conceptual entry points (Turnheim 2022) and the multiplication of empirical research. Nonetheless, framings of the destabilisation problem remain rather homogenous within transitions studies – too homogenous? Our hypothesis is that destabilisation exists as a research problem for various strands of social sciences, independently of the constitution of an epistemic community around transitions studies (and likely before).Following Andy Stirling’s injunction to Open up! and Pluralise!, this paper focuses on exploring the (expected) breadth of research concerned with destabilisation problems within the social sciences, in search for a variety of problem formulations, problem structures, concepts, methods and empirical sites – all of which may be put to work to mutually enrich those perspectives. We also introduce, along with our empirical work, conceptual and methodological tools as well as a dialogical dispositive around a shared cartographical resource. To do this, our approach focuses on the exploration of large volumes of bibliographic data, which we identify, extract, explore and analyse using a quantitative and qualitative mixed methods approach, one which employs textual analysis, corpus extension by querying the lexical neighborhood of terms, thematic clustering of documents from domain-topic modeling (Abdo, 2021), and sense-making through systematic coding and annotation by domain experts. Furthermore, our question requires us to put forward a conceptual distinction between research domains and research problems. If research domains can be traced from the textual inscriptions of an epistemic community that shares objects, concepts, instruments, references, and a common vocabulary, a research problem has no epistemic community of reference and thus no defining textual inscriptions, at the limit admitting purely abstract definitions. It is this distinction that calls for and enables our mixed methods approach. In our specific case, destabilisation as a research problem may exist in a variety of related and unrelated research domains. Conversely, research domains (e.g. ‘transitions studies’) carry a multiplicity of research problems and sub-problems (e.g. the numerous questions and research fronts carried by transition studies as enumerated in Köhler et al (2019)). Our results indicate significant research of ‘destabilisation-related problems’ within the social sciences, in a large volume of research domains and sub-domains (e.g. sociology, environmental sciences, modelling, business and organisation studies, health policy, geography, political sciences) and associated with a variety of thematic foci (e.g. resources, environmental pollution, agriculture and land use, energy, tobacco control, water management). There are different explanations for the existence of destabilisation as a research problem in different domains, including symmetry prescriptions concerning processual phenomena (focus on rise/fall, birth/death, emergence/decline), political motives and concerns (e.g. a focus on power asymmetries or disproportionate losses and damages), and contextual explanations related to the irruption of destabilisation events and related observations (e.g. post-Socialist regime destabilisations in political science) or similarly contingent policy objectives (e.g. energy modelling of plausible coal phase-out patterns, tobacco and drug bans in public health research).