摘要：This article creates a meeting ground between two distinct and fairly elaborate researchtraditions dealing with social "transitions": the Dutch societal transitions management approach, and theViennese sociometabolic transitions approach. Sharing a similar understanding of sustainability transitions—namely as major transformational changes of system characteristics—and a background epistemologyof complex systems, autopoeisis, and evolutionary mechanisms, they address the subject from differentangles: one approach asks how transformative changes happen and what they look like, and the otherapproach tries answer the question of how to bring them about. The Viennese approach is almost exclusivelyanalytical and deals with a macro ("landscape") level of human history with a time scale of decades tocenturies; the Dutch approach is based on intervention experiences and deals with a shorter time frame(decades) of micro–meso–macro levels of industrial societies. From both their respective angles, theycontribute to some of the key questions of sustainability research, namely: how can a transformative changetoward sustainability be distinguished from other types of social change. By which mechanisms canobstacles, path dependencies, and adverse interests be overcome. And what are the key persistent problemsthat call for such a transition
