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The role of sustainability initiatives and niche groups in transitions towards sustainability has received a good deal of attention. However, little is known about the people who make up these groups. This paper discusses their psychological wellbeing – a concept that comprises six elements: self-acceptance, personal growth and development, purpose in life, environmental mastery, autonomy, and positive relations with others. In the study we performed 46 semi-structured interviews with people from 11 sustainability initiatives in five countries across Europe. We find that the groups offer a platform to build and maintain social relations with other, often like-minded, people. While these relations often serve an important motivational function to stay engaged, they are not free of challenges. The interviews show that sustainability initiatives can also provide fertile ground for personal growth and other dimensions of psychological wellbeing. Environmental mastery – and specifically the capacity to cope with global environmental problems beyond individual control – is a major challenge for people engaged in sustainability initiatives. Overall, the data suggests strong links between social engagement and psychological wellbeing. From a theoretical perspective, this paper enriches the transition literature by exploring the role of psychological wellbeing among people engaged in niches.

Sustainability transitions as processes of fundamental change in societal systems are open-ended, nonlinear and uncertain. Respective research and governance approaches, e.g., transition management, propose a reflexive way of governing, aiming for a number of societal effects to help facilitating a transition. Effects include empowerment, social learning and social capital development. Jointly mentioned effects shall allow for reflexivity and innovation in developing socially robust and contextualized solutions to sustainability challenges that work in practice. But, understanding the mentioned societal effects and their interplay in more depth is necessary to design and assess transition management processes. While such understanding and related assessment framework is under development in the transition management literature, transdisciplinary sustainability research can provide a rich body of tools and experiences. Building on a review of the literature, this article develops an evaluation framework focusing on social learning, empowerment and social capital as important and hitherto under-conceptualised aspects of the sustainability transition literature. This framework is used to empirically investigate the effects of two specific transition management processes at the local scale. In doing so, the article provides a conceptual and empirical understanding of how social learning, empowerment and social capital contribute to a transition towards sustainability. The three effects are shown to be interrelated, mutually supportive and bridging different scale levels from individuals to groups, niches and beyond. Results highlight possibilities to facilitate and assess societal effects, addressing sustainability as their inherent quality.

Der Capability-Ansatz stellt substanzielle individuelle Freiheiten als Ziel nachhaltiger Entwicklung in den Mittelpunkt der Analyse. Diese konkrete Sichtweise ist nicht ohne Probleme, bietet aber auch Chancen. So relativiert der Ansatz die beliebte Diskussion um die starke oder schwache Nachhaltigkeit.