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Sustainability challenges call for a shift towards plant-based proteins. This paper aims to analyze the development of plant-based meat alternatives in Sweden with a focus on legitimation processes. We divide legitimation into cognitive, normative, pragmatic and regulative varieties, and argue that configurations of legitimacy shape the directionality of innovation. We integrate this conceptualization into an analytical framework based on the technological innovation systems approach and analyze data from 41 interviews and multiple secondary sources. The analysis shows that the development of plant-based meat alternatives has been driven by a supportive configuration of strong normative legitimacy for low climate impact, increasing cognitive legitimacy based on associations with meat-based diets, increasing pragmatic legitimacy ensuring profitability for producers and convenience for consumers, and low regulative legitimacy due to weak policy support. This has shaped directionality towards the development of highly refined products that mimic meat, rather than towards simpler plant-based products, which may bring sustainability benefits but require more substantial behavioral change. Our findings suggest that policymakers can influence all four kinds of legitimacy, but have an especially important role in actively targeting regulative legitimacy. Other stakeholders can shape cognitive, normative, and pragmatic legitimacy to propel plant-based meat alternatives in desired direction.

The literature on sustainability transitions departs from the idea that social and environmental problems call for transformative change but employs socio-technical frameworks that treat nature as a passive context. In this paper, we argue that transitions research should adopt a socio-techno-ecological approach that accounts better for ecological elements. To take steps in this direction, we review adjacent literature that engages with socio-ecological and socio-techno-ecological systems concepts. Based on insights from this literature, we discuss emerging topics for the development of a socio-techno-ecological transitions framework. Our contribution paves the way for further theoretical development and empirical validation by motivating, contextualizing and sketching a roadmap towards a more comprehensive approach to transitions research.

Science, Technology and Innovation (STI) research has mainly had an outlook that frames innovation in a pro-innovation, pro-firm, manner. Connected to this perception of innovation is a view of human and non-human resistance as a temporary unwanted response that will eventually be overcome. Studies on innovation resistance avoiding the pro-firm and pro-innovation bias are rare, and the findings provide a fragmented understanding of innovation resistance. Moreover, despite focusing on challenging the lingering pro-innovation bias, Critical Innovation Studies have not yet explained why this bias, accompanied by a derogatory view on resistance, lingers in academic writings. 

Therefore, this study aims to shed light on central presuppositions and limitations of the scholarly knowledge production on innovation and innovation resistance. Specifically, it aims to empirically explore the manifestation of innovation resistance and the dynamics involved in its entanglement with innovation processes. This is achieved through reviews of extant literature combined with an actor-network analysis of interviews, public documents and news articles concerning three different innovation processes. 

Using an actor-network theory lens, the study finds that innovation resistance is a process between programmes that manifests when an innovation programme intercepts an Other programme. The process consists of layered movements of resistance that entangle the Other with the innovation actor. The movements are conceptualised as non-programmatic behaviour, distortion, estrangement/interessement and rejection. The process enables the Other actor's agency and restricts the innovation actor's agency. The resistance can prompt accommodation from the innovation actor, consequently shaping the innovation process. For the Other, innovation resistance can protect from the influence of an unwanted innovation process. It can also be how the excluded Other (re)gains influence over an innovation process by which it is affected. 

Moreover, the study finds that the scholarly knowledge production around innovation and its resistance has been conducted from within the mega programme of Industrial Capitalism, including Top Tier journals and the Innovation Studies tribe programmes. Consequently, they lock out Other actors (such as the more than human world, people of colour, women, workers and research non-programmatic with the Top Tier journals and the Innovation Studies programmes), making them essentially invisible or negligible in the innovation research. This explains the narrow system boundaries of the field (allowing researchers to assume that innovation processes lead to a positive sum-game) and the pejorative view on resistance. 

This is a presentation of our ongoing work with a comic book presenting a narrative of the climate crisis and the needed transition to a low carbon world. The book starts with a description of the current situation of temperature rise and increasing greenhouse gas emissions. Then it gives an account of what is very likely to happen if this does not stop. The five pages presented in the exhibition represent the part of, the book where we highlight how entangled our industrial development is with fossil fuel energy. After that, the book goes on to describe prevalent ideas that make the transitions hard. We talk about economic growth, morality, and our western view on time, liberty and technology. The book ends with a suggestion of how a transition away from fossil fuels might come about. This is a popular science project aimed to raise awareness of these issues.