Resumo

Societies are facing persistent socio-environmental challenges. The objectives of sustainable development outlined in the Agenda 2030 elucidate the dimensions of these challenges and their global nature. An unprecedented economic, social, and technological transformation is needed to confront this reality. As social issues became more complex, there was a need to expand the exclusively technological perspective to a socio-technical view and there is a growing interest in systems transitions and innovation due to promote environmental efficiency.

Mapping the relevant intellectual territory to specify a research question is an essential step to deepen the studies and expand the frontier of knowledge. This paper aims to explore the state of the literature about sociotechnical transitions and MLP, also to perform critical synthesis and analyze future perspectives on the theme.

The concept of “transition” was first coined by Alex de Tocqueville in the 19th century. Since then, the term has been used by several fields of science, and, in the 90s, introduced in sociotechnical research. The basic theoretical references in the field of transition studies for sustainability are the Multilevel Perspective (MLP), the Technological Innovation System (TIS) approach, Niche Strategy Management (SNM) and Transition Management (TM). All of them adopt a systemic perspective to capture the coevolutionary complexity of the main phenomena.

It was performed a descriptive analysis to answer the following questions: Which journals publish the topic most? What are the main research areas of the journals? Where are the corresponding authors? What are the main interests (keyword analysis) of these studies? How are these works cited in the literature? What is the main methodological approach? A critical synthesis of the material was performed. It demonstrated a tendency to combine models and theories to account for the complexity of current sociotechnical transition studies.It was possible to underline perspectives to future research.

It concludes that MLP is a valid framework for addressing sociotechnical change and qualitative approaches are still important to elaborate the theory. Regarding future studies, we suggest that theories of strategy and organizational theories could be brought to the field of sociotechnical transitions. There is a tendency to combine approaches for developing more complex frameworks, but without leaving out the multilevel perspective. This trend may demonstrate, on the one hand, an insufficiency of the classic MLP to face today's challenges or an expansion of the scope of the framework.

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