Sustainability transitions in the perspective of ecological macroeconomics

Globally, societies are facing a number of serious environmental, economic and social crises. Although the multiple crises are interrelated, research communities tend to be organised around specific complexes of problems. This paper is intended to contribute to the development of an ecological macroeconomics that addresses multiple crises by including insights from different, partly overlapping research communities. The main idea is to explore the usefulness of combining three different system perspectives in the study of sustainability transitions: socio-technical provision systems, distributional systems and macroeconomic systems. First, the theoretical concept of sustainability and the different system perspectives are outlined, and then the perspectives are brought together in the discussion of a specific topic that is key to sustainable transition: the need for considerable resources to invest in the transformation of provision systems.