Power in Sustainability Transitions

Urban Farm DB summary

This chapter argues that power dynamics have received limited attention in sustainability-transitions research despite their centrality to lasting societal change, and introduces two frameworks -- "power to, over, and with" and "three relations of power" -- to analyze how power relations shift over time and are constituted. Applying these frameworks to a case study of community-supported agriculture in Portugal, the analysis shows how individual and collective agency, human and non-human interactions, and historical structures of social relationships shape opportunities and barriers for transitions. It concludes that more power-aware research incorporating non-Western and Indigenous epistemologies is needed.