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Societal transformations for addressing climate change are intensely contested and at risk of resistance and backlash to ambitious policy action. But they are frequently modeled through heuristics such as S‐curves which abstract from such conflicts, assuming increasing returns to scale as a driver of transformations. This is the case even while scholars accept the presence of political conflict in transformation processes. Within political science and allied disciplines, the notions of policy feedback and policy coalitions have been deployed to understand how such political conflicts may be understood. But these approaches risk gravitating toward an instrumental design impulse that inadvertently downplays conflict. We argue that policy action for societal transformations should be re‐conceptualized as an unfolding series of battle‐settlement events whereby heated episodic political struggles over a certain policy object or issue play out and eventually settle in ways that structure future debates while nonetheless remaining indeterminate and open to challenge or reversal. Such an approach reflects the varied empirical experiences of climate policy action to date which include both accumulation and reversal. It also helps explain trajectories of change that are discontinuous and lurching in contrast to common images of transformation as progressive and cumulative. We illustrate this approach through two cases of unfolding societal transformation on climate change: coal phaseout in the United Kingdom and renewable energy uptake in Australia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cities must transform in order to address the challenge of climate change and to achieve societal ambitions such as the sustainable development goals. However, a key impediment to achieving transformation is underdeveloped understandings of how key actors and sectors within the built environment work together to achieve goals. This paper addresses these gaps by developing and visually presenting a process map to describe: the key processes involved in producing the built environment across its life stages; key sectors of the built environment, their key actors, and the activities coordinated between them. The process map was peer reviewed by an expert reference group of built environment professionals active in Australia and the UK. The motivation for developing this process map is to facilitate future research to identify and expedite opportunities for coordinated action to address significant societal challenges such as climate change action, and the sustainable development goals – which require transformative action in cities. • Cities must transform to address climate change • We develop a process map to describe the production of the built environment • Process map describes fundamental activities for producing the built environment • Process map spans built environment life stages; identifying activities and interactions of key sectors and actors • Can be applied to inform transformative action targeted at challenges such as climate change [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]