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The European Green Deal’s focus on decoupling economic growth from environmental pressures is essential. But Europe can also increase its resilience by reducing its dependence on economic growth. Governments have a vital role in enabling this change.

International audience; In this Policy brief, we provide an overview of a recently published report by the European Environment Agency: 'Sustainability transitions: policy and practice', which we co-authored. We discuss the report's context and rationale, namely as part of a knowledge brokering process initiated at the EEA since 2015 and intended to explore the practical implications of transitions research for policy. We outline the report's 10 key messages, which concern core processes, stages and change mechanisms, key cross-cutting themes, and governance-related challenges for steering transition processes. We also reflect on the report's findings and the broader knowledge development process, identifying a number of topics the transitions community could further investigate, and highlighting challenges and opportunities for science-policy interactions.

Non-technical summary Resilience is a cross-disciplinary concept that is relevant for understanding the sustainability of the social and environmental conditions in which we live. Most research normatively focuses on building or strengthening resilience, despite growing recognition of the importance of breaking the resilience of, and thus transforming, unsustainable social-ecological systems. Undesirable resilience (cf. lock-ins, social-ecological traps), however, is not only less explored in the academic literature, but its understanding is also more fragmented across different disciplines. This disparity can inhibit collaboration among researchers exploring interdependent challenges in sustainability sciences. In this article, we propose that the term lock-in may contribute to a common understanding of undesirable resilience across scientific fields. Technical summary Resilience is an extendable concept that bridges the social and life sciences. Studies increasingly interpret resilience normatively as a desirable property of social-ecological systems, despite growing awareness of resilient properties leading to social and ecological degradation, vulnerability or barriers that hinder sustainability transformations (i.e., 'undesirable' resilience). This is the first study to qualify, quantify and compare the conceptualization of 'desirable' and 'undesirable' resilience across academic disciplines. Our literature analysis found that various synonyms are used to denote undesirable resilience (e.g., path dependency, social-ecological traps, institutional inertia). Compared to resilience as a desirable property, research on undesirable resilience is substantially less frequent and scattered across distinct scientific fields. Amongst synonyms for undesirable resilience, the term lock-in is more frequently and evenly used across academic disciplines. We propose that lock-in therefore has the potential to reconcile diverse interpretations of the mechanisms that constrain system transformation - explicitly and coherently addressing characteristics of reversibility and plausibility - and thus enabling integrative understanding of social-ecological system dynamics. Social media summary 'Lock-in' as a bridging concept for interdisciplinary understanding of barriers to desirable sustainability transitions.