Introduction

The pursuit of sustainable development is a major goal of Dutch environmental policy. To facilitate this development in the new millennium, a highly experimental independent body was created: the National Initiative for Sustainable Development (in Dutch: NIDO). NIDO was established as a temporary, publicly financed foundation which operated at arm's length from the government, and whose purpose was to ‘structurally anchor’ initiatives in society that would facilitate dramatic changes leading to a more sustainable society.

This meant that the organization had to engage in a very specific form of policy work. While all policy endeavors may be described as a combination of ‘puzzling and powering’ (Heclo 1974) or, alternatively, of design and instigation (Hoppe 1993), in the case of NIDO, this combination was more complicated because of the temporary nature of the organization. What sustainable development might entail was and remains quite unclear, but the concept implies a fundamental break with current unsustainable social dynamics. The designs NIDO was hired to produce thus had to foster radical (economic and technological) innovation in the long run. However, they had to be designed so that, in the short run, they would encourage actors (‘change agents’) to instigate immediate change.

NIDO set out to elaborate this challenge by identifying and strengthening so-called sustainable initiatives in society. It coordinated two to three-year programs that brought together forward-thinking people from industry, government, scientific community, and social organizations to foster collaborative attempts to translate the concept of sustainable development within the contexts of their own professions. In doing so, NIDO embarked on what later became known in Dutch academic circles and policy jargon as ‘transition management’ (Rotmans 2003; Grin et al. 2009), that is, as a coherent series of activities intended to help bring about a transformation in policy involving types of development that thrive on sustainable dynamics.

The associated notion of transition management, which was coined by the research group of Jan Rotmans and Rene Kemp, indicates the ‘governance principles, methods and tools’ that deal with transitions (cf. Loorbach 2007: 17). It has provoked quite some criticism because of its ‘grand design’ connotations, implying large-scale social engineering (Shove and Walker 2007).