Johan Schot’s work examines how the systems through which societies provide energy, food, mobility, and other necessities change over time. These are socio-technical systems: technologies, infrastructures, institutions, markets, and everyday practices develop together.
Two related approaches are worth distinguishing.
The multi-level perspective explains transitions through interactions between niches, regimes, and the wider landscape. Niches provide spaces for alternatives to develop. Regimes are the established rules and arrangements that stabilise existing systems. The landscape comprises wider developments, including cultural and economic trends, environmental pressures, and major shocks. These are analytical levels, rather than tiers of an organisation.
Developed by several researchers, including Frank Geels and Johan Schot, this perspective examines how alternatives develop, established arrangements persist or weaken, and different pathways of change become possible.
Deep Transitions, developed by Schot and Laur Kanger, extends the analysis across multiple systems and much longer periods. It asks how shared rules emerge and spread across systems, giving their development a common direction.
The framework interprets industrial modernity as a First Deep Transition, associated with fossil fuels, mechanisation, mass production, and resource-intensive consumption. A proposed Second Deep Transition would change these shared directions towards ecological sustainability and social justice. That’s a research proposition and an ambition, rather than an assured historical outcome.
Selected starting points
A Guide to Deep Transitions
A short introduction covering sustainability transitions, Deep Transitions, and their main concepts. A useful first stop, with diagrams and a glossary.
Typology of sociotechnical transition pathways — Frank Geels and Johan Schot (2007)
Distinguishes four pathways: transformation, reconfiguration, technological substitution, and de-alignment and re-alignment. Useful for understanding why transitions don’t all follow the same sequence.
Deep transitions: Emergence, acceleration, stabilization and directionality — Johan Schot and Laur Kanger (2018)
The founding framework paper. Combines the multi-level perspective with work on techno-economic paradigms to examine connected change across systems, including the role of shared ‘meta-rules’. Full paper:
Click to access Deep-Transitions_Emergence-acceleration-stabilization-and-directionality.pdf
Two current overviews (2026)
Frank Geels’ chapter on the multi-level perspective covers its foundations, developments, and current research questions:
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009437318.004
Jack Davies and Johan Schot’s chapter on Deep Transitions reviews the framework, empirical research, criticisms, and further questions:
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009437318.009
Both chapters are open access.
Three frames for innovation policy: R&D, systems of innovation and transformative change — Johan Schot and W. Edward Steinmueller (2018)
Connects transition research to policy. Distinguishes support for research and development, the building of innovation systems, and deliberate efforts to change socio-technical systems in response to social and environmental challenges.
Three Frames for Innovation Policy: R&D, Systems of Innovation, and Transformative Change
Previously on SysCoI
Co-evolutionary and multi-level dynamics in transitions — system innovation (Geels). Includes the aviation transition, discussion of the multi-level perspective, and a later comment linking Geels and Schot’s pathways paper:
Co-evolutionary and multi-level dynamics in transitions – system innovation (Geels)
The transition from horse-drawn carriages to automobiles — a historical application of the multi-level perspective:
Leading systems change: nine strategies — Forum for the Future’s practical use of the multi-level perspective:
Leading systems change: nine strategies to transform the way the world works | Forum for the Future
