Working-time reduction (WTR) has reemerged as a prominent eco-social policy proposal in debates on how to enable 1.5 °C-compatible lifestyles. While a growing literature documents its potential benefits for well-being and sustainability, less is known about the political conditions under which WTR becomes acceptable and implementable across different welfare regimes and positions in the global political economy. This article examines how stakeholder acceptance of WTR is assembled, contested, and constrained in practice, and what this implies for its political feasibility as an eco-social transition policy. Drawing on a hybrid Policy Delphi and Stakeholder Thinking Lab conducted in Sweden, Germany, and Latvia, we analyze how stakeholders embedded in distinct welfare-state and work-regime formations reason about WTR’s desirability, feasibility, and political possibility. The findings show widespread support for WTR on well-being grounds, but highly conditional acceptance when assessed as an ecological and political intervention. Perceived political feasibility depends on income security, labor-market institutions, coordination capacity, and countries’ positions within European and global core-periphery relations. Where welfare institutions buffer individuals from labor-market risks, WTR becomes a negotiable reform; where working time functions as a survival imperative, it remains politically fragile. We argue that WTR operates as a diagnostic “stress test,” revealing where societies can translate support for well-being into coordinated redistribution of time and where the social and institutional preconditions are missing. WTR debates in Europe are not only nationally differentiated but also globally situated, exposing the temporal and political-economic constraints that condition Europe’s 1.5 °C transition strategies.
This article explores how to use the Experimental Organization Development (ExOD) approach to transform higher education institutions (HEIs) and applies it to ecological and social sustainability. The study investigates learning processes within universities and experimental pathways toward transformation. This undertaking matters because top-down directives at HEIs often fail to achieve lasting changes. Practically, this research explores alternatives for initiating change. Theoretically, we examine organizational learning processes for sustainability in public administration systems through a case study approach. The article compares and synthesizes findings from two cases that applied the ExOD approach to sustainability challenges at two German universities. The study collected qualitative and quantitative data to identify transformational processes and the potential of the chosen approach. The results from the two cases show broad consensus among participants that changes toward sustainability are necessary. In both cases, issues of status and hierarchies play an important role in preventing change. The ExOD approach can mitigate these issues to some degree because its participatory principle fosters acceptance and voluntary commitment to institutional transformation. Nevertheless, ExOD has limited scope and impact, and it primarily produces pilot projects and proofs of concept. Overall, this study implies that low-risk experimentation can facilitate organizational learning for institutional sustainability transitions.
This article introduces the SETER framework, a conceptual tool for analyzing the interplay between socio-ecological transformation (SET) and economic reasoning (ER). In the context of global crises and the contested nature of sustainability discourses, the framework identifies nine key categories (economic goals, decisive economic institutions, role of the state, spatial scope, role of technology, economy-nature-nexus, socioeconomic cohesion, transformative dynamic, and transformative agency) to systematically compare diverse SET narratives and their basic underlying economic imaginaries. Drawing on insights from social studies of economics (SSE) and different strands of SET literature, the framework highlights how ER shapes SET discourses and potential pathways, influencing both diagnoses of socioecological crises and proposed solutions. The SETER framework also enables typifying antagonistic narratives opposing SET, such as techno-libertarianism or fossil modernization. While the framework offers a useful tool for categorizing and comparing SET narratives, integrating it with power-focused analytical tools is necessary to assess the performative influence of these narratives. By offering a flexible, cross-sectoral, and longitudinal approach, the SETER framework provides a robust methodology for navigating the complexities of SET-related discourses, current counter-developments, and the critical role of economic imaginaries.
Throughout history, reductions of animal use in the economy have rarely resulted from moral awakening. Instead, just as new inventions have enabled many forms of animal use (e.g., harpoons, battery cages), new technological innovations have also frequently rendered long-entrenched forms of animal exploitation obsolete. This Commentary examines a series of cases – including but not limited to the replacement of whale oil by kerosene, ivory by plastics, goose quills by metal pens, horses by engines, and guano fertilizer by synthetic nitrogen – to illustrate how new inventions, rather than humane sentiment or philosophical arguments, have produced substantial and enduring reductions in animal use. While ethical arguments have driven personal, corporate, and public policy reforms, new technologies’ superior utility, scalability, or cost-efficiency has generally accelerated the abandonment of animal use altogether. Using Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation Now (2023) and its assessment of the limited progress since Animal Liberation (1975) as its starting point, this commentary examines historical cases in which technological substitution reduced institutionalized animal use. The Commentary argues that efforts to reduce animal exploitation should place greater emphasis on developing, scaling, and deploying alternatives that can outperform animal-based products in utility, affordability, or convenience. This approach has implications for how the public and private sectors fund, regulate, and prioritize innovation.
This study addresses the need for a deeper, more empirically grounded understanding of agency dynamics in processes of change by examining successful sustainability-related projects in the mobility domain of the medium-sized German city of Wuppertal in the early stages of its sustainability transformation. Using a grounded-theory approach, based on document analysis and 15 semi-structured interviews, the article analyzes the general mobility development as well as three cases: the construction of a 23-kilometer (km) multifunctional path for cycling, walking, and recreation (Nordbahntrasse), the implementation of a neighborhood mobility station/hub (MiQ), and the pedestrianization of a city square (Laurentiusplatz). The results conceptually describe the continuous agentic making of change under challenging circumstances and particularly suggest the importance of proactive, persistent, and resilient leading agents. Key agents completed the project through strategies of communicative pragmatism to mobilize and secure additional resources, as well as intentional spatial management to curb and prevent the emergence of destructive conflicts. While the article shows how individuals can initiate and drive substantial change in the mobility development of a constrained city, it also points out how intensive, demanding, and often tedious the process can be. Conceptual findings are critically discussed in relation to four key literatures on individual agency and agency dynamics: institutional/transition work, intermediation, the trinity of change agency, and urban transformative capacity. This comparative inquiry highlights the advantages of conceptual integration, as well as the need to advance theorization by linking the explicit study of individuals’ agency and their constitution to the collective making of change.
