Reflexivity is a critical practice in research, enabling scholars to examine the interpretive, political, and rhetorical dimensions of their work. This perspective paper explores the role of reflexivity in the study of energy transitions, where implicit assumptions often shape research trajectories and outcomes. Drawing on Susur and Karakaya's (2021) typology, we analyze hidden assumptions across three empirical contexts—aviation, electricity networks, and bio-energy carbon capture and storage. Our reflexive practice reveals common biases, including a tendency towards techno-optimism, the delimitation of spatiotemporal boundaries that may overstate technological viability, and an implicit normalization of capitalist logics that may reinforce social inequities. We argue that a deliberate, iterative approach to reflexivity enhances the robustness of research on sustainability and energy transitions, helping to uncover taken-for-granted worldviews, definitions, and methodological choices. By sharing our own reflections, we seek to encourage greater reflexivity in energy research, fostering more nuanced, critical, and inclusive approaches to addressing today's complex and wicked problems. We conclude by offering recommendations on how reflexivity can be systematically integrated into the research process to strengthen both analytical depth and transformative potential.

The decarbonisation of aviation is a major challenge in the global pursuit of sustainability, with aircraft operations contributing around 3 % of global carbon dioxide emissions. Electric aviation offers a promising response, combining the potential for zero-emission flight with revitalised short-haul and regional markets through low-cost, point-to-point operations. However, its development faces major obstacles, including technological immaturity, infrastructural lock-ins, regulatory complexity, and uncertain consumer acceptance. In this context, legitimacy—the perceived appropriateness of an emerging technology within established social, institutional, and technical contexts—becomes a vital precondition. This paper examines how legitimacy is enacted through the interplay of discursive and material practices, conceptualised as sociomaterial legitimation. Drawing on a longitudinal case study of Heart Aerospace, a Swedish electric aircraft start-up, the analysis traces how narratives, artefacts, and actor-networks interact to build and maintain legitimacy over time. Using media analysis, participant observations, and documentary sources, the paper shows that legitimacy is not merely constructed through discourse but materially performed through prototypes, demonstrators, and choreographed public events. These findings advance an understanding of sociomaterial legitimation in sustainability transitions and offer practical insights for policymakers and industry actors working to support emerging technologies under conditions of uncertainty.

Research on sustainability transitions offers valuable insights into systemic change across societal systems like energy, mobility, and buildings. These systems, heavily reliant on fossil fuels, now face mounting climate consequences and require fundamental reconfigurations in their modes of production, distribution, and consumption. Yet much of the research field treats sustainability as a pre-existing, stable endpoint, often defined through fixed goals, metrics, or policy targets, which risks obscuring the inherently contested and political nature of sustainability itself.

In response, this thesis advances a performative understanding of sustainability, viewing it not as a fixed target but as continuously enacted, negotiated, and contested through discursive and material practices. Swedish aviation provides a compelling case to explore this perspective. Whilst celebrated for its environmental leadership, Sweden ranks amongst the highest globally for per capita aviation emissions, highlighting deep tensions between global connectivity and climate responsibility.

Drawing on four papers, the thesis examines how competing understandings of sustainability are enacted and contested through transition efforts in Swedish aviation. Paper I reviews mitigation strategies and policy developments. Papers II and III explore how industry actors perform sustainability through narratives and technological innovation. Paper IV analyses the discursive conflict between the aviation industry and the flight-free movement, revealing deeper struggles over what sustainability should mean and require.

This thesis offers an empirical account of two competing discourse-coalitions—Green flying and Staying on the ground. Each advances divergent visions, narratives, and practices that shape the trajectory of aviation’s transition. Conceptually and methodologically, it advances a performative, narrative-oriented approach that foregrounds the politics of meaning-making in transitions. This perspective highlights the complexity of sustainability transitions and calls for more reflexive, pluralistic, and open-ended forms of governance—holding space for disagreement, fostering experimentation, and acknowledging that transitions are ever in-the-making.

Forskning om hållbarhetsomställningar erbjuder värdefulla insikter i systemförändringar inom samhällsområden såsom energi, mobilitet och byggnation. Dessa sektorer, som är starkt beroende av fossila bränslen, står nu inför växande klimatutmaningar. Sådana omställningar innebär i grunden att produktion, distribution och konsumtion omformas för att upprätthålla centrala samhällsfunktioner. Emellertid tenderar fältet ofta att betrakta hållbarhet som ett förutbestämt och stabilt slutmål, definierat genom fasta mål, indikatorer eller politiska riktmärken. Detta riskerar att dölja hållbarhetens inneboende politiska och omtvistade karaktär.

Denna avhandling utvecklar i stället en performativ förståelse av hållbarhet, där hållbarhet ses som något som ständigt iscensätts, förhandlas och bestrids genom diskursiva och materiella praktiker. Svenskt flyg utgör ett intressant fall för att undersöka detta perspektiv. Trots landets rykte som miljöföregångare har Sverige bland de högsta flygutsläppen per capita i världen, vilket blottlägger spänningar mellan global rörlighet och klimatansvar.

Baserat på fyra artiklar analyseras i avhandlingen hur olika förståelser av hållbarhet skapas och utmanas genom omställningsinsatser i svensk flygsektor. Den första artikeln granskar klimatstrategier och politiska ramverk. De två följande artiklarna utforskar hur branschaktörer gestaltar hållbarhet genom narrativ och teknikutveckling. Artikel fyra analyserar den diskursiva konflikten mellan flygindustrin och flygfrittrörelsen, vilket blottlägger djupare strider om vad hållbarhet bör innebära och kräva.

Avhandlingen presenterar en detaljerad empirisk analys av två diskurskoalitioner—Grönt flyg och Stanna på marken—som representerar motstridiga visioner, narrativ och praktiker som formar flygets omställning. Konceptuellt och metodologiskt bidrar avhandlingen med ett performativt och narrativt inriktat tillvägagångssätt som synliggör de politiska dimensionerna av meningsskapande i omställningsprocesser. Detta perspektiv framhäver komplexiteten i hållbarhetsomställningar och efterlyser mer reflexiva, pluralistiska och öppna styrformer—där utrymme ges för oenighet, experimenterande och ett erkännande av att omställningar alltid är i rörelse.

The aim of this paper is to analyse contemporary transitions in the aviation industry in Sweden. We take a durational perspective to consider narratives as coordinating mechanism in sustainability transitions. We find that industry actors are constructing narratives for alternative aircraft fuels and technologies as they seek to maintain aviation's societal function whilst mitigating its climate impact. By reconciling memories of the past with their expectations for the future, narratives act to coordinate actors’ transition activities in the present. In this way, narrative are more than an initiator of transitions, but constitute paths in-the-making, highlighting the agency of actors in enacting change in the present and shaping sustainability transitions of the future.

The future of aviation is a growing subject of debate, with different actors promoting diverse discourses on climate mitigation and sustainability. We employ argumentative discourse analysis to explore competing discourses around the future of aviation in Sweden, focusing empirically on the aviation industry and the flight-free movement. Drawing on thirty interviews, one workshop, and forty-three documents, we show how these actor groups represent two discourse-coalitions that articulate opposing discourses on the future of aviation: ‘Green flying’ and ‘Staying on the ground’. Following a logic of (techno)solutionism, Green flying anticipates aviation to maintain a dominant role in society and assures that technological progress will overcome the sector’s climate concerns in the future. Meanwhile, Staying on the ground follows a logic of prefiguration to demonstrate the desirability of an alternative and less aeromobile future, with actors embodying new norms and practices around avoiding flying in the present. The paper contributes to research in critical policy studies by demonstrating how actors with conflicting interests, values, and worldviews imagine and engage with futures differently in their attempts to shape transition pathways and policy-making in the present.

Aviation accounts for approximately five percent of global greenhouse gas emissions through the combustion of fossil fuels. This paper analyses the opportunities and challenges of mitigation measures in limiting travel volume, energy and emission intensity to reduce the climate impact of aviation in Sweden. Several measures are in place that aim to reduce the climate impact of the aviation industry, ranging from regulations to technology alternatives to fossil-based jet fuel. These measures face several crosscutting challenges, many of which are of a socio-economic and political nature, and these aspects are often neglected in favour of focusing on technological solutions. The market creation for alternatives to fossil-based jet fuel is a major challenge, as most consumers today have a limited awareness of and willingness to pay for these innovations. Policy measures in place are proven ineffective in incentivising change. An understanding of the industry as a socio-technical system is required. The value of this review is its broader consideration of the pathways to reduce aviation's climate impact, offering new perspectives and pointing to areas for further research considering all components, their interactions and interdependence.

Urban and peri-urban communities across the Global South face considerable energy access challenges with over one billion people living without adequate access to basic services such as energy, water, and healthcare. Lack of access to modern energy services has cascading effects on the United Nations 2030 Agenda and the achievement of the corresponding Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). In this article we address this issue, using the SDGs as a framework to evaluate how policies and plans for local energy access can be coordinated with all SDG Targets. With a case study in Kibera, Kenya, we analyse how local energy access could enable or inhibit all local SDG Targets. Based on this knowledge, we propose a set of actions to achieve full modern energy access without compromising other local Sustainable Development Goals. We propose a new taxonomy to evaluate how actions affect the interlinkages between local energy access and the achievement of the SDGs. We find that the SDGs, applied as a framework to direct national policies and strategic projects, offer a holistic outlook, helping to unpack discrete thinking and support an integrated sustainable future for all.