Unlock sytemic locking? From conversion towards transition

The potential sectoral (food chain) transition approach suffers from a strong regimen’s irreversibility. In this paper we consider the question of cooperation regime transformation. Indeed in our case, the lock-in issue also proved to have a professional dimension linked to the cooperation regime. While the “filière” quality convention (Gomez 1994) could re-frame the traditional relationships between different members of the “filière,” this potential transformation was blocked by the strongest professional/sectoral convention. Professional conventions (Allaire 2004) are competency conventions that define and qualify “good” work within a set of rules. Professional conventions may be destabilized by transforming legitimacy systems through a territorial (rather than sectoral) approach and as a consequence start to overcome the socio-technical lock-in. Interactions between weak pressure at the landscape (macro) level (EU), niche (micro) level, and knowledge coming from the previous intervention research created space for regime destabilization (Geels & Schot 2007b). Local stakeholders (institutions) joined with local actors (consumers-citizens, and naturalists) to create room for a learning process and let the “Gaume Grassland Steer” niche experiment emerge.