Large public and private organisations can be crucial actors if not gate keepers for societal and socio-technological change towards Sustainable Development Goals and climate neutrality. Yet, as bureaucratic organisations they are prone to conservatism and inertia. Typical examples are public energy utilities, universities, or funding organisations. In a recent paper with Jakob Edler and Florian Helfrich (2025) we suggest and illustrate a number of key governance principles helping to foster transformative change and to make such bureaucracies more agile.
Our paper seeks to fill a critical gap in the context of mission oriented and transformative policies by conceptualising generic governance conditions for large public and private organisations to engage constructively with the transformation of wider socio-technological systems as an ongoing learning process.
So far, innovation and other policies to achieve transformative missions tend to rely on established instruments, mostly supply side, fostering research and innovation activities to move in desired directions. More sophisticated approaches stimulate absorption and diffusion of innovation and support market creation and uptake. However, for existing socio-technological systems to shift towards sustainability, constitutive actors within such systems, like large public and private organisations, need to actively foster the transformation, as a process of internal and external organisational experimentation and innovation. They are critical actors in their respective system context in two ways: in the past they have co-produced the problematic effects of existing systems; in the future they can severely influence the speed and direction of transition of systems and act as change agents towards more sustainable systems – provided they manage to transform themselves, too.
Those actors are very diverse organisations, ranging from large companies, governmental funding bodies, higher education institutions, and related intermediary organisations. They are situated between the individuals and their behaviour on the one hand and the broader systems level on the other, i.e. at the meso level of systems change, where they fulfil critical systemic functions.
In order to adjust to and support transformations, they need to re-orientate their organizational missions, strategies and behaviours – far beyond their research and innovation activities – and to re-configure their internal and external relationships. They have to actively engage in the very process of defining directions and orchestrating the system transformation, critically reflecting about their roles in related processes, and to build up capabilities to change. If critical meso-level actors resist change, transformations will be hindered or fail altogether. Therefore, in this article we explore – in a diagnostic manner – generic governance conditions that diverse critical actors will need to become constructive and effective change agents. We do so by drawing on and expanding a set of (meta-)governance (Jessop 2002) principles that originally were developed in the context of ‘responsible research and innovation’, a context posing very similar challenges for corporate actors (Kuhlmann et al. 2016; Randles 2017).
We illustrate the relevance of these governance conditions with three short vignettes of critical actors in Europe, a major public-private energy provider, a governmental funding agency, and a university of technology. Inspecting the suggested generic conditions helps to reveal fostering and hampering fac-tors for transformative ambitions of these actors and their capacity to act as change agents.
Highlights
- Large public and private organisations can be critical for system transformation.
- As transformative change agents large public and private organisations need to re- configure their internal and external identity and organisational ways of working.
- We suggest an array of generic meta-governance principles as diagnostic measures and requirements for constructive and productive organizational change.
Read the full paper: Edler, J.; Helfrich, F.; Kuhlmann, S. (2025): Fostering Transformation. A Governance Frame for Large Public and Private Organisations as Change Agents in Transformations, (Fraunhofer ISI Discussion Papers Innovation Systems and Policy Analysis No. 90). Karlsruhe: Fraunhofer ISI. Doi: 10.24406/publica-4767
veridiction | Stefan Kuhlmann 