Towards transformative emergence. Research challenges for enabling social-ecological tipping points toward regional sustainability transformations

A crucial task to accelerate global decarbonisation is to understand how to enable fast, equitable, low-carbon transformations in those regions of the world most intensive in the production and use of fossil fuels. To support this endeavour, we underline the relevance of the boundary concept of social-ecological tipping points (SETPs) and highlight three key challenges for its robust conceptualisation and policy use in assessing regional sustainability transformations. Positive SETPs can be understood as the moments or critical thresholds in which, as a result of cumulative and beneficial effects of previous deliberate and targeted interventions, additional actions or events push a coupled social-ecological system towards an a more just and sustainable trajectory or configuration. Our review shows that research and policy usage of SETPs towards regional sustainability faces three key challenges: (a) integrating theoretical and empirical contributions from diverse social and ecological sciences, together with complexity theory (b) designing open transdisciplinary assessment processes able to represent multiple qualities of systemic change and enable regionally situated transformative capacities, and (c) moving away from one-directional metaphors, static ideas of individual agency or single equilibrium in energy transitions; and instead, focus on understanding the conditions and capacities for the emergence of systemic transformations and regenerative processes across multiple levels of changing agency, unfolding both in social and biophysical systems and in many moments in time. We refer to these complex and place-situated processes as learning to enable regional transformative emergence.