Environmental Innovation and Societal Transitions 1 (2011) 152–159

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

Environmental Innovation and

Societal Transitions
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/eist

Analyzing sustainability transitions as a shift between

socio-metabolic regimes
Marina Fischer-Kowalski ∗
Institute of Social Ecology, IFF - Faculty for Interdisciplinary Studies, Klagenfurt University, Schottenfeldgasse 29,
A-1070 Vienna, Austria

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Article history: This essay seeks to specify the theoretical choices and assumptions
Received 2 December 2010 involved in studying sociometabolic transitions, such as sustain-
Received in revised form 14 April 2011
ability transitions, in a way that distinguishes them from mere
Accepted 14 April 2011
“changes”. These generalizations draw on experiences with the
empirical analysis of historical transitions on various scale levels.
Keywords:
This perspective is illustrated by using material and energy flow
Sociometabolic regimes
data to demonstrate global sociometabolic regime transitions dur-
Sociometabolic transitions
Global material and energy flows ing the 20th century.
© 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

1. Distinguishing transitions from other changes

A scientific treatment of sustainability transitions – or, for that matter, any transition as distinct
from just “change” – requires a certain conceptual clarity and self-discipline: clarity in defining the
unit of analysis, in how to distinguish different phases or stages, and in how to conceptualize the
directionality of time.
What is an adequate unit of analysis? The focus ought to be on a theoretically and operationally
identifiable system. The system should be self organizing and sufficiently complex to maintain itself
under changing conditions. For such a system, there would be environmental boundary conditions:
If they are transgressed, major features of the systems functioning will change. In the extreme case,
the system may collapse (if it is an organism, die), or else it may resume its self organization in a new
“state”. Both would then be called a transition. Can such a system be or become “sustainable”? Which
criteria could be used to evaluate sustainability? In our opinion, the key answer is the following: the

∗ Tel.: +43 1 5224000 416; fax: +43 1 5224000 477.

E-mail address: marina.fischer-kowalski@uni-klu.ac.at

2210-4224/$ – see front matter © 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.eist.2011.04.004
 M. Fischer-Kowalski / Environmental Innovation and Societal Transitions 1 (2011) 152–159 153

system is unsustainable if it behaves in ways that actively bring about those very boundary conditions
in the system’s environment. So the unit of analysis cannot just be the system itself, but the system
in interaction with relevant other systems in its environment. A system as such cannot be judged as
sustainable or unsustainable. In the case of social systems, as well as with organisms, the system is
unsustainable if it triggers changes in the environment that threaten its basic metabolic requirements.
The second consideration, again very abstract, is the distinction of stages or phases. The typical
model of alternating phases is the S-curve (Rotmans et al., 2001), although other models have also
been considered, such as the so-called “lazy eight” (Berkes and Folke, 1998), lock-in situations or
system collapse (Tainter, 1988), or “tipping points” in earth systems (Lenton et al., 2008). From the
notion of transition, there follows an understanding that no linear, incremental path leads from one
state or phase to the other, but rather a possibly chaotic and dynamic intermediate process, or a discrete
“jump” from one state of the system into another. One has to be aware, though, that these distinctions
are extremely sensitive to the observer’s choice of scale. From a wider perspective something may
appear as a continuous process, progressing steadily. But from a closer perspective the same process
may appear as whimsical, sharply fluctuating. For example, the process of walking from a certain
distance looks like a linear movement; from close distance, one sees muscles contracting and relaxing
again, weight shifting from one leg to the other, so the process appears as cyclical. From a still closer
and shorter perspective it would appear as transition. Thus descriptions of processes as transitions or
as gradual change do not necessarily exclude each other. One type of process may well be nested into
the other. Nevertheless, the idea of a system gradually behaving ever more sustainably (as suggested
in theories of ecological modernization sometimes, see Mol and Spaargaren, 1998) does not comply
with the term “sustainability transition”.
A third consideration relates to the order of phases or stages, in other words, the understanding of
directionality of time. This directionality can either imply consecutive stages of a developmental type
(like Herbert Spencer’s notion of evolution, or Marxist historical materialism, or Rostow’s stages of
economic growth), or it may follow a Darwinian type of evolutionary theory by assuming the future
to be contingent upon the past but an open process into the future: you know the mechanisms driving
it but not where it will lead to. In the first case, when a developmental model is employed, each
consecutive stage follows with a certain necessity from the previous stage, and it is, as a rule, considered
superior, more mature. The progress to this more mature stage can be accelerated or delayed. In the
second, “Darwinian” case, the direction of change is principally unknown (Gould, 2002). Many people
believe earlier transitions (such as the industrial revolution) to have been of a developmental type,
simply human progress. Can we think of sustainability transitions as a kind of inevitable, logical step
beyond the past, leading to a more mature state of the system?
The socio-metabolic approach makes certain choices with regard to these distinctions. It says the
appropriate unit of analysis is society, interpreted as a socio-metabolic system (Fischer-Kowalski and
Weisz, 1999) that interacts with systems in the natural environment. It claims that a transition to a
(more) sustainable state implies a major transformation, on a par with the great transformations in
history such as the Neolithic or the Industrial Revolution (Haberl et al., 2011). Sieferle (2001) goes
even as far as stating that industrial society as such is but a transitory stage from agrarian society
to a very different as yet unknown type of social organization. And finally, there is the presumption
that a sustainability transition is both inevitable and improbable. It is inevitable, because the present
sociometabolic dynamics cannot continue for very long any more, and it is improbable because the
changes need to depart from known historical dynamics rather than being a logical step from the past
into a more mature future state.

2. Does it make sense to regard transitions as a shift between socio-metabolic regimes?

A regime, according to the socio-metabolic approach, is rooted in the energy system a society
depends upon, that is the sources and dominant conversion technologies of energy.1 The theory of

1
This is a different use of the term regime than, for example, that used in the Dutch transitions management theory (Kemp
et al., 2007) which describes a transition as interference of processes at three different scale levels: macro, meso and micro. The
154 M. Fischer-Kowalski / Environmental Innovation and Societal Transitions 1 (2011) 152–159

socio-metabolic regimes has been developed by Sieferle (1982, 2001) and elaborated by Fischer-
Kowalski and Haberl (2007). Depending on the reasons for and the speed of an energy transition,
parts of the system may at a certain point in time be under different energy regimes: urban industri-
alized centers, for instance, may coexist with traditional agricultural communities, or industrialized
countries with agrarian colonies. Such a “synchronicity of the asynchronic” (Füllsack, 2011) influences
the overall course of transitions. How these processes evolve is contingent upon specific conditions.
The socio-metabolic approach shares with complex systems theory the notion of emergence: neither
can one state be deliberately transformed into the other, nor can the process be fully controlled. One is
confronted with self-organizing dynamics (Maturana and Varela, 1975) to which orderly governance
or steering cannot be applied. The sustainability transition with regard to energy needs to be a change
away from fossil fuels, and probably back to solar energy again, thus somehow reversing the historical
transition from the agrarian to the industrial society and ongoing contemporary “development” that
was and is a shift from solar energy to large scale fossil fuel use.2
What drives socio-metabolic regime transitions? On such a broad and long term scale one cannot
easily talk about actors and their deliberate efforts. What one can mainly analyze is structural change
of interlinked social and natural systems, across a broad range of variables. Among these, the socio-
metabolic approach focuses on a relatively narrow set describing the society-nature interface for which
quantitative measurements can be reliably obtained in very different contexts. The advantage of this
self-restraint is that it is possible to demonstrate the interconnectedness of socio-economic changes
and changes in natural systems (between population growth, diets, land use and species extinction, for
example) and to generate models for important biophysical requirements and boundary conditions
for system perpetuation. When an energy regime changes, society and its metabolism alter, and also
the natural systems it interacts with. A regime can be characterized by the socio-metabolic profile
of the society involved, and the associated modifications in natural systems that occur either as an
unintended consequence (such as resource exhaustion or pollution) or as intentional change induced
by society (such as land cover change).3
Based upon the socio-metabolic approach, research has been undertaken into historical cases of
transitions. Winiwarter (2003) and McNeill and Winiwarter (2004) have approached the issue of soils
as the main resource base of agriculture, and made a modeling effort to determine when for exam-
ple a historical agricultural village would have to be given up (Winiwarter and Sonnlechner, 2000).
Krausmann et al. (2008) have shown the role of resource and land scarcity for European history on
various scale levels. There was a modeling effort to determine the limits to city growth under agrarian
conditions, given certain yields and the constraints to land transport, while considering metabolic
needs for food, construction material and firewood, as well as varying rates of appropriation of agri-
cultural surplus by cities (Fischer-Kowalski et al., 2004). These are no more than examples of first
efforts to understand what happens when social systems challenge the boundary conditions of their
environment and transgress their own coping capacity, and attempts at explaining under which con-
ditions transitions (collapses sometimes) occur. Under the agrarian regime, this is easier to determine,
as its resource base is much narrower and local constraints play a key role.4

scale levels represent functional relationships between actors, structures and working practices that are closely interwoven.
A regime is typically located at the meso level. The approach assumes that transition dynamics do not start in one place but
at different locations at different scale levels. Only when these dynamics modulate (have a similar direction), can a scaling up
effect emerge as a necessary condition for achieving a transition (Fischer-Kowalski and Rotmans, 2009).
2
Frequently it is overlooked (see, for example, Grübler, 1998; Moe, 2011; an exception is Smil, 2008) that the most dominant
source of energy, amounting to almost 100%, in pre-industrial societies is biomass: human and animal nutrition, and firewood.
The common overestimation of the importance of technological sources (such as windmills) is supported by modern energy
accounting such as reflected in the indicator TPES (total primary energy supply), which leaves food and feed as energy input out
of consideration. It is maybe one of the key achievements of the socio-metabolic approach to capture in its systemic perspective
the total energy base of societies (Haberl, 2001).
3
Society itself is seen as a structural coupling of a communication system (Luhmann, 1995) with biophysical compartments
(such as: a human population, livestock, and physical infrastructure); social metabolism serves to maintain these biophysical
compartments within a certain territory (Fischer-Kowalski and Haberl, 2007).
4
See for example Krausmann et al. (2008) for a description of the agrarian-industrial transition in the UK and Austria. There
can also be established some cross relations with the work of Boserup (1981), dealing with population growth and density as
main drivers of change in developing countries.
 M. Fischer-Kowalski / Environmental Innovation and Societal Transitions 1 (2011) 152–159 155

Table 1
Framework conditions favourable or unfavourable to unleashing socio-metabolic transitions.

New resources/opportunities

Not perceivable Perceivable, appear promising

Previous resources/opportunities
Still intact Status quo maintained Status quo defended + eventual expansion
Threatened or exhausted System collapse Transition dynamics triggered

Table 1 makes an attempt at using the insights gained from such historical studies. It spells out
a set of hypotheses on a more general level, so that they might also be applicable to a sustainability
transition.
It is claimed that what drives a transition is the structural exhaustion of opportunities, and at the
same time the opening of new opportunities (see Fig. 1). If only previous opportunities are exhausted,
and no substantial new opportunities open up, one may rather expect system collapse (Diamond,
2005). If previous opportunities are not exhausted when new resources/opportunities offer them-
selves, vested interests in the status quo will often be strong enough to prevent change. This case
seems an inherently unstable situation, though: As long as the interest groups benefiting from the use
of the “old” resources are very strong (such as the landed aristocracy at the beginning of coal utiliza-
tion, or the oil industry at present5 ), they may delay the use of the new opportunities for a long time,
maintaining the status quo.6 They also may give in gradually and allow for the additional utilization
of the new resources that are connected to different interest groups. This may result in expansion
(building one resource use upon the other), but in the longer run would give rise to a transition.
Both dimensions in Fig. 1 involve objective criteria (such as changes at the interface of society and
nature), and subjective elements of human perception and learning. New energy sources, superior in
energy density and cost, have of course been the prototype of new opportunities, and such a grand new
opportunity at present is not in sight. But probably also other new opportunities, such as sophisticated
solar technologies in combination with low-energy IT, could play the same role.

3. The dynamics of global socio-metabolic change in the 20th century

The environmental historian McNeill (2000) summarized the 20th century using the ironical title
“Something New Under the Sun”. According to the statistics he assembled, there is rarely any dimen-
sion of human social life and interference with the environment that has not undergone a rapid
expansion worldwide. During this one century, many indicators of human activity and human use
of the environment exceeded the fivefold growth of the human population, substantial in itself, some-
times by an order of magnitude. Taking McNeill’s reconstruction of the 20th century seriously, humans
are driving a biophysical explosion in limited space. This explosion, as is to be briefly demonstrated
further down, derives from multiple transitions. The countries that had already undergone a transition
from the agrarian to the industrial socio-metabolic regime during the 19th century made a transition
from the coal-based to the oil-based mode. During the same period, many other countries started
their transition from an agrarian regime to the coal based and oil based mode on a faster track. Some
countries have not as yet really started this transition (Lankao et al., 2008).
Haberl et al. (2011) have interpreted, after analyzing a large number of country metabolic profiles,
the S-curve in Fig. 1 as a global result of such transitions. Fig. 1 shows metabolic rates of global energy
and materials use. Energy is measured as Domestic Energy Consumption (DEC)7 in Gigajoules per

5
Out of the 20 largest companies in the world, eight are oil companies (Forbes List 2010). This indicates the dominant
economic position of directly oil-related economic actors. Among the large companies that joined the “global climate coalition”
to heavily and fairly successfully lobby against the IPCC and international climate agreements, were Exxon Mobile, BP, Shell Oil
USA, Texaco, Daimler Chrysler, Ford and General Motors (Rahmsdorf and Schellnhuber, 2006).
6
See the notion of “incumbent regime” by Kemp et al. (2007).
7
Domestic Energy Consumption is defined as Total Primary Energy Supply (TPES) plus food and feed in Gigajoules (Haberl,
2001).
156 M. Fischer-Kowalski / Environmental Innovation and Societal Transitions 1 (2011) 152–159

Fig. 1. Global rates of energy and materials use across the 20th century per capita and year. Energy use is measured as Domes-
tic Energy Consumption (DEC) which equals Total Primary Energy Supply (TPES) as reported by IEA, plus nutritional energy of
humans and livestock, in Gigajoules. Domestic Material Consumption (DMC) is measured in tonnes according to MFA method-
ology as standardized by Eurostat (2007). On the global level, as international trade equals out, DMC is equivalent to global
annual (raw) material extraction. Materials comprise the main groups: biomass (for human and animal nutrition, combustion
and other uses), fossil fuels, metal ores and industrial minerals, and minerals used in construction (such as sand, gravel and
limestone).
Source: Based on Krausmann et al. (2009).

capita, and material use as Domestic Material Consumption (DMC) in tonnes per capita. The interpre-
tation, in short, is as follows: The dynamics of global energy and materials use was, for most of the
20th century, marked by the highly developed industrial countries. The apparent global patterns may
be distinguished into a coal-dominated phase of industrial development that raised overall energy and
materials use but at the same time population—thus while there was huge growth in capital, per capita
consumption stagnated. This phase started before 1900 and ended globally around 1930, a date also
marked by a world economic crisis. The next phase, dominated by the use of petroleum, realized what
many dreamed of: a sharp increase in consumption opportunities for each person, in other words the
American Way of Life.8 This pattern dominated the global metabolic profile from around 1930 to the
early 1970s, as can be gathered from the steep increase in per capita metabolic rates in Fig. 1 during
that period.
In the early 1970s, a new pattern emerged: there was again a relative stagnation of metabolic rates,
but this time in combination with low population growth. Global GDP/capita continued to rise. After
the year 2000, in the industrial countries, per capita energy and material consumption continued to
stagnate, but global metabolic rates again turned sharply upwards (Fig. 1).
Interpreting changing growth patterns of material and energy use as socio-metabolic transitions
seems only justified if confirmed by a broader analysis. Such an analysis is ongoing and requires
giving attention to demographic variables, technological variables, political variables and last but not
least economic variables, on various scale levels. It extends the scope of this paper to go into any
detail. Nevertheless, we found it surprising that such a simple quantification as global metabolic rates
seems to reflect major other well-known changes.9 Demographically, the coal phase was linked to
massive population growth in the industrializing countries; and one can register a substantial drop in

8
Actually this was realized mainly for the upper and middle classes in the industrial countries.
9
Discussion of the economic changes is beyond the scope of this short essay.
 M. Fischer-Kowalski / Environmental Innovation and Societal Transitions 1 (2011) 152–159 157

population growth around 1930 (and again after 1970). Technologically, the breakthrough of coal use
was associated with the steam engine and railroads, while the breakthrough of petroleum was linked
to automobiles, electricity and the industrialization of agriculture, the “green revolution”. The phase
after 1970 was marked by the rise of information and communication technologies. Politically and
culturally, the transition to coal was connected to the rise of the British Empire, and the transition to
petroleum to American hegemony that possibly started to decline around the time of the US oil peak
in 1973 (Hubbert, 1971). From then on, there is a continuous rise of “emerging economies” mainly
emulating the patterns of the previous industrial transformation. This rise is also responsible for the
sharp turn upwards in metabolic rates after the year 2000. We found it very surprising how many
events (such as global crises) and changes in structural variables fitted neatly to apparent turning
points in a timeline of per capita energy and materials use. This encourages us to talk of transitions in
this context.
At the time of writing, the economic crisis years 2008–2010 are not documented in the data yet.
They surely caused a substantial downturn of the curves. Will the curves later resume their course
upwards? According to our guess, they will not: a period of strong fluctuations will ensue, driven by a
rising and volatile oil price (global oil peak?), supply shortages and a new trend of price increases for
important raw materials.
From the perspective of a potential sustainability transition, the phase of stagnation of metabolic
rates (but not of global income) between the early 1970s and the late 1990s is very interesting. Quite
obviously, there had occurred structural change terminating the rapid increase in per capita material
and energy consumption, in industrial countries and globally.10 This may have signaled a historical
window of opportunity for physical degrowth in industrial countries, in alliance with the rise of new
information and communication technologies. But politically, this window of opportunity was ignored,
or even forcefully shut. Instead of utilizing the structural opportunity of heading for a less material
and energy intensive lifestyle in the OECD world and more calmly accepting the emerging economies
to catch up, the “limits to growth” message (Meadows et al., 1972) was discarded.11 Most political
efforts were invested in returning to the higher growth rates of the previous period. This strategy was
not fully successful in re-establishing the previous high rates of economic growth. It also missed out
on the chances to stabilize employment and mitigate rebound effects by reductions in working time,
to stabilize climate change by taxing fossil fuels, or to tackle social inequality. Policy measures were
directed at maintaining business as usual, and despite major accidents (Three Mile Islands, Chernobyl,
now topped by the meta-GAU in Fukushima), huge public investment continued to be spent for nuclear
energy in denial of a possible lower energy future based on renewable sources.

4. Can the socio-metabolic approach provide conceptual and empirical guidance to

sustainability transitions?

What distinguishes a socio-metabolic analysis conceptually and methodologically from other

approaches to study historical transitions? Conceptually, it differs from storylines on technological
change or from storylines on economic cycles by systematically bringing in empirical informa-
tion about biophysical variables and attributing an important role to nature. In the socio-metabolic
approach, nature matters in terms of providing easily accessible, high density energy from limited geo-
logical sources as a key ingredient of the “economic growth engine” (Ayres and Warr, 2009). Forces
of nature matter as stochastic events in demonstrating the limitations of human technology, such as
winds over Chernobyl distributing radioactive particles all across Europe, hurricanes over the Mex-
ican Gulf destroying offshore drilling platforms, or sea level rise threatening the survival of island

10
Undoubtedly, this has a number of different reasons, one of them being the outsourcing of energetically and materially
intensive processes from industrial countries to emerging economies.
11
Turner (2008) has provided, based upon the model by Meadows et al. (1972) and the data available for the decades between
1990 and 2005, an interesting confirmation for the world following the “business-as-usual” track as projected in 1972. If we
consider the scale of global resource use, disregarding population numbers, there has been a more or less continuous rise,
multiplying annual raw material extraction by a factor of 8 and primary energy use (TPES) by a factor of ten, while global GDP
rose 23-fold (Krausmann et al., 2009).
158 M. Fischer-Kowalski / Environmental Innovation and Societal Transitions 1 (2011) 152–159

states and influencing climate negotiations. But more systematically, natural systems matter as they
coevolve with human interventions and exert pressure upon societies to keep on changing.
Methodologically, this approach to transition analysis is but in an early stage. Much effort has been
devoted to creating consistent long term databases with variables across many domains and across
several scale levels, from local communities (or small pixels) to countries, regions and the global
level. Statistical analysis has gone into identifying phase-specific interrelations between variables
and trends. A few modeling exercises have helped to generate missing data and perform consistency
checks. But adequate modeling techniques allowing the reconstruction and simulation of structural
change are still pending (see www.matisse-project.net). It may be expected that the declining belief in
19th century type of progress continuing forever will, in combination with unexpected and possibly
catastrophic events, trigger new approaches for analyzing and modeling major transformations of
society-nature relations.

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