Conclusions and continuations: Horizons for studying technologies in decline

The need to seriously discuss and practise endings of established socio-technical systems comes from the policy and research worlds alike. Currently, sustainability options are largely discussed through the lenses of cost–benefit, risk and anticipation in attempts to shed light on how certain paths may be purposely avoided or reoriented. In this book, we instead discussed and illustrated the possibilities for abandoning, discontinuing, destabilising established socio-technical trajectories as they become undesirable or misaligned with environmental and social justice objectives. The contributors to this book sought to uncover the characteristics of active governance (how and under which conditions are technologies and systems abandoned?) as well as the means for active governance (how can discontinuation be pursued, under which constraints?). The contributions bear witness to the significant variety of approaches that may be employed to address such problems—and we are aware that we have barely scratched the surface. We identified a series of themes and questions stemming from the contributions to the volume, before concluding with a central conundrum around which many studies of decline are articulated, both here and in the wider literature—the relationship between decline and innovation.