ABSTRACT
Between 2001 and 2004, transition management was experimentally applied in a regional context in Parkstad Limburg, a regional cooperation between eight municipalities in the most southern part of the Netherlands. The context was a project to develop a regional spatial vision (in Dutch: structuurvisie), commissioned by regional government. This project offered the possibility for an experimental implementation of the initial ideas of transition management as formulated in Rotmans et al. (2001). At the start, only the basic assumptions underlying the transition management approach and only initial ideas on how to implement the approach were formulated. In hindsight, this project provided a fruitful context for developing ideas on system analysis, the transition arena and the transition agenda. In this sense this project provided much of the empirical basis for ideas on the transition management framework and instruments presented before. In addition, it also led to signifi cant adjustments and improvements in the theoretical part of the transition management approach.
