Phasing out fossil fuels, banning pesticides, exiting nuclear power, retiring the combustion engine — modern societies are under growing pressure to actively end established unsustainable technologies. Yet while innovation is intensively studied, remarkably little is known about how successful endings actually come about. Technologies of Discontinuation: Towards Transformative Policies (Edward Elgar, 2026) closes this gap.
Written by Peter Stegmaier, Pierre-Benoît Joly, Phil Johnstone, Andy Stirling, Marc Barbier and me, our book distils more than a decade of international research across teams in the Netherlands, France, Germany and the UK. Drawing on three in-depth case studies — the ban on the pesticide DDT in France, the UK and the US, the EU phase-out of the incandescent light bulb, and the contrasting nuclear power exits in Germany and the UK — it presents the first grounded theory of how discontinuation governance works in practice.
The book speaks to three audiences at once:
- Academics gain a new conceptual vocabulary and comparative framework for studying destabilisation, phase-out and decline — essential reading in transition studies, STS and innovation research.
- Governments find strategic options for making discontinuation an explicit objective of transformative innovation policy, from managing critical junctures to designing legitimate phase-out processes.
- Companies learn how to anticipate and navigate the ending of established products, infrastructures and business models — and how to position themselves for what replaces them.
The book’s central message can be sharpened into a policy-capable formula: the deliberate ending is not a by-product of innovation but an independent, plannable component of transformative policy — and usually its more difficult part. Business and society have professionalised the acceleration of the new. The competent, democratically legitimised and socially cushioned withdrawal of the old is an institutionalisation task of this century that remains outstanding.
Technologies of Discontinuation: Towards Transformative Policies is published by Edward Elgar Publishing (hardback, eBook and ePub) in the series “Destabilisation, Discontinuation and Decline as Horizons for Transformation”.
