Insight
A useful diagnostic sits at the intersection of two things people usually study separately: how much room a niche technology has been given to succeed, and how much capacity the state has to organise around it. Read together, they sort every real transition into one of four patterns, and each pattern has a different failure mode.
Most writing on socio-technical transitions treats them as a race between an incumbent regime and a challenger niche. That framing is not wrong, but it hides the variable that tends to decide the pace and the fairness of the outcome: what the state is doing while the niche is trying to break through. A country can have world-leading niche innovation and still stall if the public architecture around it is thin; another can have deep state capacity and no niche worth aligning it to. The interesting configurations are the ones where both are moving, or neither.
The Lab's shorthand for that reading is the two-axis matrix below. It draws on the long-running multi-level perspective on socio-technical transitions and on the parallel literature on state capacity and industrial policy, and locates every transition case the Lab has studied somewhere on it.
State-led infrastructure substitution without much niche-led innovation. The transition is real, and it is fast, but its shape is set by public procurement and regulation rather than by a competitive market of new entrants. Two clean examples:
Directed transitions get results quickly and often fairly, because a competent state can equalise access by design. The failure mode is a fragile monoculture: when the direction of policy shifts (Norway now debating the pace of its EV incentives; Singapore continuously recalibrating housing energy standards), a niche that never had to compete on its own terms has no independent base to fall back on.
The most rapid configuration on the matrix, and the hardest to engineer. Niche innovation and state architecture reinforce each other: firms build technologies the state was already trying to procure, and the state builds the rules and infrastructure the firms need to scale.
Coordinated transitions produce the fastest observable change but are politically expensive. When they fail, they fail slowly, through a widening gap between what the policy assumed and what the niche has learned in the meantime.
Neither the state nor the niche is doing enough. Incremental change at best; the incumbent regime persists mostly because there is no serious alternative and no serious pressure. Much of low-resource OECD building electrification sits here today: the retrofit rate is an order of magnitude below what is needed to meet climate targets, and neither a coordinated public programme nor a scaled private niche is materially closing the gap.
The failure mode of a stalled regime is the least dramatic and the most consequential: a decade passes and very little of the visible landscape has changed. Independent research on stalled transitions rarely gets published because there is little to publish. When the Lab writes about stalled cases, it is usually to name specifically why the alignment failed, not to celebrate a breakthrough that did not happen.
The partial-breakthrough pattern of most emerging-market technology transitions, and the BRW framework's home ground. State capacity is limited; a niche innovation succeeds anyway, but the shape of its adoption is bounded by the parts of the incumbent system the state cannot help it around.
The word bounded is doing a lot of work here. Bounded leapfrogging is genuinely valuable, and is often the only workable strategy in a low-capacity context, but its ceiling is set by the parts of the incumbent regime the niche cannot renegotiate alone. Studying the shape of that ceiling is a large part of what the Lab does. See the Water Access programme and the Finance programme for two extended readings of the pattern.
A tempting misuse of the matrix is to treat "coordinated transition" as the goal and everything else as a shortfall. In practice, no policy actor gets to choose their starting quadrant. What they get to do is act with clear eyes about where they are.
Every one of these questions is answerable only with field evidence, from the people the transition is meant to reach. That is the Impact Measurement work. The matrix is where the evidence gets located, not where the transition happens.
Applied to the case studies on this site:
This piece draws on the broad literature on socio-technical transitions and on state capacity, adapted through the Lab's own field engagements.
This is an independent insight piece by Transitions Lab. For the methodological spine behind the reading, see the BRW framework. For the field work behind the case placements, see Case Studies. To discuss a study, see Contact.