Transforming Large Socio-technical Systems towards Sustainability: On the Role of Users and Future Visions for the Uptake of City Logistics and Combined Heat and Power Generation

While the radical transformation of the large socio-technical systems (LSTS) of energy supply and transport is widely regarded as a necessity to cope with their unsustainable side-effects, this transformation is confronted with a large number of structural and behavioural barriers. The top-down liberalization policies of recent years have induced a transformation but they have not necessarily contributed to a more sustainable provision of energy and transport services. Bottom-up processes of strategic niche management with new emerging technologies have the potential to trigger regime shift towards a more sustainable supply of energy and transport services. In order to guide such regime shifts, shared future visions can play an important facilitating and aligning role. Their relevance for the uptake of new technologies depends critically on the active involvement of users in the process of vision building.