Resumo

Renewable Energy Technologies have been hailed as the most promising mechanisms to cut emissions and to develop more sustainable societies. Much progress has been made and the share of these new technologies in relation to overall power generation has increased over the past 10 years with them increasingly becoming mainstream sources of energy.

Despite the current efforts in promoting their continuing growth, there has been a slower diffusion of renewables, especially in developing country contexts. A new field of research, named sustainability transitions emerged in order to gather more insights into how such renewable energy technologies can penetrate faster and become mainstream. This field evidenced rapid growth and several sub-fields emerged. This calls for a need to trace the trajectory and possible future developments by means of a literature review.

The sustainability transitions field accounts for "long-term, multi-dimensional and fundamental transformation processes through which established socio-technical systems shift to more sustainable modes of production and consumption". As research grew, several sub-fields appeared, including technological innovation systems (TIS), the multi-level perspective (MLP), transition management and strategic niche management approach.

We used a structured literature review method, called SYSMAP (Vaz & Uriona Maldonado, 2017). The main steps involved are: i.Construction of the database of raw articles; ii.Filtering, which includes duplicate filtering, alignment filtering and full-text alignment filtering; and iii.Content analysis based on co-citation network analysis.

Our analysis covers a total of 311 records in our dataset, covering 47 countries of 303 organizations, 94 journals, 609 authors, 999 keywords and 14.873 cited references. The main results we bring in are the top-cited documents, the document citation network, the top-cited references, the document co-citation network and the historiograph of the evolution of the field.

Our analysis identified the key studies in the field. some of them are: Markard and Truffer (2008), Markard et al. (2012), Bergek, Jacobsson, Carlsson, et al. (2008), Bergek, Jacobsson, and Sanden (2008), Hekkert et al. (2007), two papers by A. Smith (Smith & Raven, 2012; Smith et al., 2010), Smith et al 2010, Farla et al. (2012), and several highly cited papers by F.W. Geels (Geels, 2002, 2004, 2010, 2011; Geels & Schot, 2007; Schot & Geels, 2008; Verbong & Geels, 2007).

Markard, J., Raven, R., & Truffer, B. (2012). Sustainability transitions: An emerging field of research and its prospects. Research Policy, 41(6), 955-967. doi:10.1016/j.respol.2012.02.013. Vaz, C. R., & Uriona Maldonado, M. (2017). Revisão de literatura estruturada: proposta do modelo SYSMAP (Scientometric and Systematic Yielding Mapping Process). In C. R. Vaz & M. Uriona Maldonado (Eds.), Aplicações de Bibliometria e Análise de Conteúdo em casos da Engenharia de Produção (UFSC ed., Vol. 1, pp. 21-42 p)