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How scientists might better contribute to SDGs in the land sector? At the invitation of INRAE, a group of high-level international experts delivers a comprehensive and systemic approach.

This paper investigates how actors across spatial levels shape the directions of transition. We examine two Chinese provinces, Inner Mongolia and Jiangsu, with contrasting directionalities of solar photovoltaic (PV) development. The former developed PV as part of the large-scale centralized power system, and the latter focused on PV development as a core element of an alternative distributed form of power generation. We argue that three aspects have been key for understanding the divergent patterns: the specific portfolio of enacted institutional work; the type of interactions between niche and regime actors; and the selective leveraging of national institutional conditions by provincial actors.

Transformative Innovation Policies (TIPs) propose that addressing the key challenges currently facing our societies requires profound changes in current socio-technical systems. To leverage such `socio-technical transitions¿ calls for a different, broad mix of research and innovation policies, with particular attention being paid to policy experiments. As TIPs diffuse and gain legitimacy they pose a substantial evaluation challenge: how can we evaluate these policy experiments with a narrow geographical and temporal scope, when the final objective is ambitiously systemic? How can we know whether a specific set of policy experiments is contributing to systemic transformation? Drawing on TIPs principles as developed by and applied in the activities of the Transformative Innovation Policy Consortium (TIPC) and on the concept of transformative outcomes, this article develops an approach to the evaluation of TIPs that is operational and adaptable to different contexts.

In this paper we aim to conceptualize the role of users in creating, expanding and stabilizing the automobility system. Drawing on transition studies we offer a typology of user roles including user-producers, user-legitimators, user-intermediaries, user-citizens and user-consumers, and explore it on the historical transition to the automobile regime in the USA. We find that users play an important role during the entire transition process but some roles are more salient than others in particular phases. Another finding is that the success of the transitions depends on the stabilization of the emerging regime which will trigger upscaling in terms of the numbers of adopters. The findings are used to reflect on potential crossovers between transitions and mobilities research.

The role of science and technology in social progress will be drawn out as a special cross- cutting theme in the final 'Rethinking Society for the 21st Century' report. Uniquely, this theme has been subject to special co-ordination amongst report contributors, led by Helga Nowotny and Johan Schot and co-ordinated from SPRU – Science Policy Research Unit at the University of Sussex. In January of this year Science, Technology and Society (STS) authors met at the Volkswagenstiftung in Herrenhausen, Hannover to reflect on chapter work so far, and consider emergent themes. Following on from that workshop, in this blog we reflect on five perspectives on science, technology and innovation which are deeply implicated not only with social progress, but how we frame and assess progress in the first place. These perspectives will be embedded directly in a large number of the report chapters.