Empowerment and the challenge of applying transition management to ongoing projects

This article explores the relation between empowerment and long-term policy design. More specifically, it studies the empowerment aspect of a specific long-term policy design, transition management (TM), both theoretically and empirically. First, the respective bodies of literature on empowerment and TM are synthesized and four theoretically (dis)empowering aspect of TM are discussed. On that basis, four research questions are distilled as a framework for empirical analysis. Second, an empirical account is given of challenges that came up during the application of TM in ongoing projects, and these challenges are analyzed in terms of (dis)empowerment, following a critical line of argument. Third, a more instrumental line of argument distils lessons for TM, by applying empowering insights to design strategies on how to deal with the upcoming challenges of TM. The challenges, analyses, and lessons are summarized in a table at the end. In conclusion, the theoretical and empirical findings are related to a discussion on long-term policy design more generally.