The emergence and development of governance capacities for transformative change: Insights from energy regions in the Netherlands

The world is facing interlinked crises of climate change, biodiversity loss, and deepening social inequality, which expose the structural failures of dominant societal systems rooted in economic growth. These systems perpetuate unsustainable patterns of overproduction, overconsumption, and the exploitation of both people and nature. There is growing consensus among scholars and policymakers that such persistent problems cannot be addressed through incremental change alone, but require transformative change involving fundamental, system-wide shifts in structures, practices, and meaning-making. These transformations concern changes in essential societal subsystems, such as energy, food, and mobility, and are not merely technological, but deeply political, social, and normative in nature.

This imperative for transformative change has profound implications for governance. Traditional governance models centred on control, efficiency, and linear decision-making are increasingly inadequate. Instead, governance arrangements are needed that create and sustain conditions for transformative change by fostering adaptability and reflexivity, enabling coordination across sectors and governance levels, and supporting experimentation with alternative practices that can destabilise entrenched norms and unsustainable trajectories.

The regional scale is increasingly recognised as a crucial arena in which such governance efforts take shape. Regions function as fluid governance arenas where actors from different sectors and levels come together to address complex, transboundary challenges inherent in transformation processes. At the same time, existing regional governance approaches often struggle to cope with the complexity, uncertainty, contestation, and long-term nature of transformative change. Without new ways of working, these shortcomings risk producing fragmented and ineffective responses that reproduce, rather than transform, unsustainable practices. This dissertation proceeds from the premise that actors at the regional scale need to develop new forms of governance capacities in order to effectively and legitimately support transformative change. Governance capacities for transformative change refer to the abilities of actors to work collectively to mobilise, create, and change structural conditions that are conducive to transformative change.

While the concept of governance capacities has gained prominence across various strands of literature, two key gaps remain. First, although research has identified important dimensions of governance capacities, there is limited understanding of how these capacities emerge and develop in practice, particularly in contested, uncertain, and dynamic governance contexts. Without such insight, practitioners lack a basis for designing targeted interventions to deliberately strengthen governance capacities. Second, existing research has predominantly focused on national-level policymaking or urban contexts, leaving the regional scale comparatively underexplored. Yet the regional scale is theoretically distinct, as it rarely aligns with formal jurisdictional boundaries and is embedded in multi-level governance arrangements where authority and responsibility are dispersed across actors and sectors. This positioning makes transboundary collaboration and the alignment of diverse perspectives central to regional governance for transformative change.

Against this backdrop, the aim of this dissertation is to advance understanding of how governance capacities for transformative change emerge and develop at the regional scale. Focusing on the energy system as a key domain where transformative change is both necessary and ongoing, the research examines how actors engaged in regional governance collaboratively navigate transformation processes. The dissertation draws on qualitative case studies of Dutch energy regions, conceptualised as governance arenas in which actors from different administrative levels, sectors, and domains work together to address transboundary challenges in regional energy transitions. Using interviews, participant observation, and document analysis, the individual chapters employ different analytical lenses to explore how governance capacities are emerging and developing in practice. Together, the dissertation contributes to theoretical debates on transformative governance and offers practical insights for policymakers and practitioners seeking to strengthen governance capacities for sustainability transitions in and through regions.

Chapter 2 examines how interactions between governance levels shape governance capacities for transformative change, with a specific focus on orchestrating capacity. Drawing on two case studies of Dutch energy regions (Holland Rijnland and Noordoost Brabant), the chapter highlights tensions between hierarchical command-and-control logics and collaborative logics. The Regional Energy Strategy provided institutional interfaces that enabled coordination and joint sensemaking across governance levels, creating conditions for orchestrating capacity. At the same time, collaboration unfolded in the shadow of hierarchy, creating tensions around roles, responsibilities, accountability, and institutional flexibility. These tensions negatively influence capacity development in the energy regions by complicating strategic alignment and the creation of opportunity contexts.

Building on Chapter 2’s focus on structural conditions, Chapter 3 shifts attention to how actors, operating within these multi-level governance settings, exercise collective agency to develop governance capacities for transformative change. The chapter proposes an analytical framework that conceptualises governance capacity development as emerging from the interplay between structure and collective agency. Specifically, it introduces shared intentions as a core aspect of collective agency through which governance actors develop governance capacities and integrate this notion with a perspective of strong structuration. The chapter illustrates the framework’s application with a case study of the Eindhoven Metropolitan Region that examines how collective agency emerges. The research identifies two key forces that drive the development of governance capacities for transformative change: path dependence and social learning.

Chapter 4 builds upon the previous chapter by further unpacking the role of social learning in the development of governance capacities for transformative change. It develops a four-phase model of social learning – comprising (1) noticing and bracketing, (2) articulating, (3) integrating, and (4) diffusing – to conceptualise how shared understandings of problems and solution pathways emerge and spread within governance networks. Applying this model to four learning episodes reveals distinct patterns of learning, ranging from incremental reframing to more radical frame breaks, triggered by both internal and external dynamics. The findings show that governance change results from the interplay of these learning patterns over time rather than from single learning moments. Overall, the chapter demonstrates how social learning mediates the recursive relationship between agency and structure, enabling actors to gradually reshape governance arrangements and create conditions for the further development of governance capacities.

Following Chapter 4’s focus on how social learning unfolds, Chapter 5 turns attention to the conditions that shape these processes and outcomes. Drawing on insights from collaborative governance and team effectiveness research, the chapter synthesises institutional, interpersonal, intrapersonal, and material conditions influencing learning in cross-boundary collaboration. By describing five learning episodes from regional energy transition governance in the Netherlands, it illustrates how these conditions interact to shape learning processes. Rather than examining conditions in isolation, the chapter advances an interactional approach, highlighting how the interplay among different types of conditions enables or constrains learning. The findings show that facilitating learning requires intentional design, coordination, and coherence across interventions, rather than reliance on isolated measures.

This dissertation concludes that governance capacities for transformative change are shaped through the dynamic interplay between structure and agency. It identifies social learning as a central mechanism through which governance actors develop these capacities in the context of regional energy transitions. The findings show how social learning, characterised by iterative processes of collective sensemaking, drives changes in governance over time.

In doing so, the dissertation makes three key contributions to the literature. First, it contributes to the literature on transformative capacity by offering an empirically grounded, process-oriented understanding of how governance capacities emerge and develop at the regional scale. Second, it contributes conceptually to the study of collective agency in sustainability transitions by developing the notion of shared intentions and integrating it with strong structuration theory to analyse transformative governance processes. Third, it provides a better understanding of the role of social learning in driving governance change, highlighting both the conditions that shape learning and the ways in which learning contributes to governance change in regional contexts.

These insights are particularly relevant for intermediaries, facilitators, knowledge brokers, and programme coordinators who play a central role in designing, guiding, and supporting collaborative governance and social learning processes in the context of sustainability transitions.