The notion of “sociotechnical” is an important concept for interdisciplinary research on the transformation of the energy supply. Different branches of research agree that the provision, transmission, and distribution of energy are not simply a matter of physics. The transformation of the energy infrastructure is significantly a societal project, carried by technical innovation and social change. However, in social science and humanities research the interrelation between technical and social processes is often not explicitly explored, even though the interrelationship is the decisive descriptor that distinguishes sociotechnical entities from their environment. This article examines the merits of enriching the concept of sociotechnical by adding the distinction between tight and loose couplings in technical operations and human activities. While tight couplings are necessary to sustain control, they hamper change, and while loose couplings are necessary to adapt and to uphold choice, they increase complexity. Additionally, the article concludes that the introduction of “smart” technologies—an essential vision of the energy transformation—changes the composition of tight and loose couplings. Technical ideas such as machine learning and artificial intelligence go beyond mere automation. We might as well face a new sociotechnical reality. The introduction of intelligence in systems makes more loose couplings necessary. Paradoxically, this allows for new functionality and services by establishing complex operations while at the same time diminishing control by social systems.

Latin American societies currently confront numerous social, economic, and environmental issues. The complex and interlinked nature of these issues demands responses that fully and equally engage with the social and environmental domains in creative and integrative ways that blur traditional dichotomies and disciplinary boundaries. Most importantly, they need to weave in and reflect the plurality and specificity of the contexts in an autonomous and non-colonialist fashion. In this paper, we draw inspiration from approaches that emerged in the Global North such as Resilience Thinking, Policy Design, and Transition Design, all of which strive for knowledge plurality and synthesis applied to systemic transformational processes. To contribute to this pluralistic motivation and to promote critical reflection and learning, in this work we outline the main contributions of such approaches and have them converse with Latin American perspectives and practices. Through the application of a Transition Design lens, a practice-oriented perspective aimed at catalyzing societal transitional processes towards sustainable futures, we act as practitioners and interlocutors that adopt, adapt, and expand its theoretical and methodological applications in collective learning spaces, processes, and platforms. The action-oriented nature of this approach allows us to analyze particular cases of application, their contexts, and their theoretical or methodological nuances which determine their potential or degree of success in generating actual change. The structure of this article moves from outlining and introducing the main frameworks and notions relevant for adopting a Transition Design approach in Latin America, to describing cases developed in different pedagogical or action-research platforms, culminating with a collection of reflections stemming from our experiences applying Transition Design in Latin America. The first section offers a theoretical compass to expand a more robust framework that supports and enables socio-environmental transitions in the region. The second part presents three case studies to illustrate the application and interpretation of different methods and the challenges and opportunities presented. We conclude by offering insights into potential future pathways for embracing and deepening holistic and systemic approaches like Transition Design in Latin American settings.

Interest in causality is growing in sustainability science and it has been argued that a multiplicity of approaches is needed to account for the complexities of social-ecological dynamics. However, many of these approaches operate within perspectives that establish a separation between what has causal agency and all the rest, which is relegated to the role of background conditions. We argue that the distinction between causal elements and background conditions is by no means a necessary one, and that the causal agency of background conditions is worthy of investigation. We argue that such conditions correspond to what Karen Barad has called a “cut”: a specific determination of the world (or part of it) respective to another part, for which it becomes intelligible. In this sense, most approaches to causality so far operate from “within” particular cuts. To illustrate this, we focus on the paradigmatic case of the Baltic cod collapse in the eighties. This case has been extensively studied, and overfishing has been identified as a key cause explaining the collapse. We dig deeper into the conditions which characterized fishing practices in the run-up to the collapse and uncover the separation between the social and the ecological that they enforce by encouraging policies to increase productivity under the rationale of national “development”. We then re-examine the case from a process-relational perspective, rejecting the separation of nature from society. A process-relational perspective allows us to consider relations as constitutive of processes through which what exists becomes determinate. For this purpose we use the concepts of intra-action (co-constitution of processes) and of performativity (determination of language and matter within processes). We complete our conceptual framework by drawing inspiration from pragmatist philosophers and suggest that the concept of intuition can constitute an alternative to untangle causal dynamics and explain social-ecological phenomena beyond the cause/condition dichotomy. This article seeks to fulfil two objectives: firstly, to question the thick boundaries between conditions and causal elements that explain the processes in which social-ecological systems evolve; secondly, to provide a different approach to transforming a social-ecological system.