It has been argued that sustainability transitions research should pay attention to sustainability experiments in developing countries, because they represent alternative opportunities for reshaping socio-technical regimes that could lead to sustainable production-consumption systems in these regions (Berkhout et al, 2010). Despite a few exceptions (Ghosh et al., 2016), little attention has been paid to the role of actors involved in these experiments, i.e. change agents that aspire to lead sustainability transitions within contexts of market imperfection, clientelist and social exclusive communities, patriarchal households and patrimonial and/or marketized states (Wood and Gough, 2006).
This paper aims at contributing to fill this gap, by discussing an experiment for developing eco-social business models in Colombia. Conceptually, the paper explores two complementary aspects. The first aspect refers to agency. Leading transitions to sustainability requires specific forms of agency from actors, distinctive from other kinds of agency. The paper discusses literature on change agents and social innovators to give more detail about the features of these specific entrepreneurial facets. The second conceptual aspect refers to the way change agency relates to practice. In this case, the creation or maintenance of emerging sustainable fields of practice. Here the paper discusses the notion of practice work, a conceptual approach useful for addressing the layered ways in which an actor ‘goes about’ practice in the attempt to create change (Balanzo, 2016).
Empirically, we have followed the activities of community leaders in Santa Rosa del Sur, a small town in the rural area of Bolívar in northern Colombia. This region exhibits great sustainability challenges: main economic activities include coca plantations and gold mining in river banks, which bring about environmental degradation and biodiversity loss (because of large deforestation and heavy-chemical pollution), and negative social consequences such as informal jobs, violence and short-term mentality. These leaders have promoted other economic activities based on environmental protection and restoration and community development.
Following an interpretive approach, we documented the activities of four actors, from April 2015 until April 2016, who actively participated in an experiment for developing eco-social business models. By paying attention to both narratives (expressions of sense-making) and practices (shared behavioural routines), we have found evidence of what it takes for actors to negotiate and tinker changes for sustainability. This agency-based approach constitutes a contribution to the understanding of more diverse and somehow messy processes of sustainable socio-technical changes in the developing world (as it has been previously suggested by Smith and Raven, 2012).
Overall, the paper argues that leading transitions to sustainability implies actors’ active involvement in various fields and, as such, the deployment of multiple identities (Downey, 1992) relating various entrepreneurial repertoires (Balanzo, 2016). These many facets cohere along a specific take on practice work, by means of which actors manoeuvre to bring about change and strive to sustain it.
5c Sustainable Innovation and Transitions (zero emissions, new materials, recycling, IT, e
