Sustainability initiatives, such as Repair Cafes, are sites of niche innovations with the potential to contribute to an urban sustainability transition. Using the multi-level perspective as a framework, we explore the visions of change of 12 Repair Cafes in Berlin to understand how the members believe the movement can effect change. We explore the dynamics and demographics of the different user groups within the Repair Cafes to understand who has a voice within them. We found that Repair Cafes have two main visions of change which ask for mass participation. However, we also found that latent discrimination by ‘expert’ technician volunteers discourages the involvement of women and lower social classes. This knowledge that Repair Cafes are inconsistent in their purported visions of change and their practices has repercussions for their role in urban sustainability transitions. • Repair Cafes envision a transition where as many people as possible participate in repair activities. • The roles and hierarchy within the Repair Cafes lead to power differentials. • The roles within Repair Cafes lead to women and lower classes being discouraged from participation. • Repair Cafes are inconsistent between their visions of change and their practices. • Current Repair Café practices hurt their ability to contribute to a transition.

Mega-droughts can cause disruption to the affected society sparking a transition. We explore the causes and effects of the 2015-2016 mega-drought in Colombia. Using the multi-level perspective as a framework, we found that the mega-drought sparked an energy transition in Colombia whose dynamics were impacted both by the institutionalization of niches as well as the ability to predict the next drought. We were able to trace, using the current understanding of anthropogenic forces, the cause of the mega-drought to socio-technical landscape development influenced by human-induced warming and land use change. We found that the regimes in Bolivia and Brazil were able to influence the landscape through deforestation, and hence contribute to the intensity of a mega-drought in Colombia. The knowledge that a regime can cause disruption in regimes in other geographies and sectors has implications for transition research as well as decision-making for coping with droughts and other disasters.

Following critiques that scholarship on socio-technical transitions was overly normative and emptied of politics, a burgeoning stream of literature has begun offering understandings of transition that are more informed by politics. Whilst fruitful, there is a tendency in some of this work to constitute politics as the background or contextual frame in which socio-technical change unfolds, rather than as a process central to its emergence. Collaterally, relatively little attention has been given to how politics emerges in the everyday practices and struggles of energy initiatives. Engaging with recent work in urban studies, this paper explores how political processes unfold on the ground. We argue that one key site for this emergent politics is the institutional and regulatory arrangements that energy initiatives must navigate in carving out their activities. We do not address these simply as an externalised array of norms and procedures that variously impose upon and impede the efforts of energy initiatives. Instead, we explore how initiatives' trajectories are shaped by and entangled with the institutional and regulatory landscapes in which they operate. What we call politics emerges in and is exposed through initiatives' everyday efforts to negotiate and respond to regulatory strictures and opportunities. We explore the regulatory conditions that influence the everyday practices of three differently scaled energy initiatives in Scotland, Spain and Germany, each of which is variously involved in the generation, distribution and sale of energy. Our paper considers not only the ways that institutional arrangements generate obstacles for renewable energy innovation, but also how they may open up certain - albeit limited - possibilities for action, in some cases with larger ramifications for how the production and distribution of energy are governed. However, we note that where such possibilities arise, they are heavily determined by the terms set by existing institutional and regulatory frameworks, pointing to the limited scope for crafting new kinds of energy politics under current conditions.

This article explores how resource dependence leads to barriers to urban community gardening. Nine barriers to urban gardening were identified: finance, space, organizational structure, water, external damage, soil, communication, interpersonal issues, and participation issues. Using process tracing and grounded theory, we found that these barriers could be divided into three groups: primary, secondary, and participation barriers. Primary barriers are caused and directly influenced by the regime, whereas secondary barriers are the result of decisions and actions taken while addressing the primary barriers. All of these barriers cause frustration and affects the ability of the gardens to retain and acquire new members. This affects the longer term sustainability of the gardens and their potential to contribute to an urban governance transition.

We explore how applying for and maintaining a legal form of organization exposes community-based initiatives (CBIs) to pressures with the potential to shape them. Using grounded theory and the multi-level perspective, we found that there are two types of pressures through which regimes influence CBIs associated with legal forms of organization: resource dependence and coercive isomorphism. These pressures come in the form of barriers which push and prevent CBIs in the process of acquiring and maintaining a legal organizational form. CBIs resist and work to overcome the pressures using social capital, internal agreements, citizen financing, and umbrella organizations. This knowledge contributes to the understanding of how regimes resist and create barriers to innovations, how CBIs cope with this regime resistance, and has implications for the design of instruments for purposeful transitions.

We examine the suitability of using the multi-level perspective to describe disaster-related transitions and their barriers in an institutional environment that expects disaster responders, such as government agencies, to adhere to the increasingly established principles of disaster risk reduction. We created a process-tracing test based on disaster and transition literature and applied it to two cases: Cyclone Nargis and Hurricane Katrina. In applying this test we found that multi-level perspective is a valid way to describe disaster-related transitions. We also determined that both the concepts of build back better and disaster risk reduction influenced the transitions. Moreover, a lack of resources and a strong government desire for control presented obstacles to transition. These disaster-related transitions have implications for policy considerations. Knowledge from this article can inform future studies on disaster response and recovery.