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Rise and Demise of Industrial Modernity

Project description

Evolution of industrial modernity and its relation to current challenges

Industrial modernity, encompassing shared institutions and practices related to technoscience and the environment, has driven major advancements in contemporary societies. However, in today’s context of socio-ecological polycrisis, many of its traits have become maladaptive, often resulting in solutions to challenges like climate change that inadvertently exacerbate the problems. The ERC-funded RiDe project will apply a novel deep transitions framework to transform our understanding of industrial societies, exploring their acceleration, crises, and transformative potential since the 1900s. Drawing on this analysis, the project will develop an innovative theory that provides an empirically grounded, comprehensive, and historically informed understanding of industrial modernisation for sustainability science.

Objective

Contemporary societies are underpinned by industrial modernity: a set of commonly shared ideas, institutions and practices related to the natural environment and technoscience. Having historically unleashed massive leaps in productivity, economic growth and societal welfare, many traits of industrial modernity have now become maladapted to the current socio-ecological polycrisis. As a result science and technology promise to solve the grand challenges of climate change, resource depletion and loss of biodiversity with one hand, only to keep intensifying them with another. There is thus a fundamental need to rethink industrial modernity.

Attempts to detect signs of this fundamental shift currently remain fragmented within and between disciplines like sustainability science, innovation studies, or history of technology. RiDe will use a new Deep Transitions framework from the sustainability transitions field to provide an overarching synthesis on the acceleration, crisis and transformative prospects of industrial societies from 1900 to the present. It focuses on 3 questions: 1) what are the major historical continuities and emerging ruptures in industrial modernity? 2) what are the mechanisms through which technoscience keeps blocking transformative environmental practices? 3) in which countries is major transformative change most likely to occur?

RiDe will 1) use a mixed method research design, combining text mining, databases, stylized narrative explanation, and process-tracing, which; 2) enables it to discover new empirical patterns in the evolution of industrial modernity, and; 3) develop a composite index for identifying countries currently least hindered by the historical legacy of industrial modernity. The results will be synthesized into the first macro-level middle-range process theory in transitions studies, offering a new comprehensive, historically-informed and empirically-backed interpretation of industrial modernization for sustainability science.

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Programme(s)

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Topic(s)

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Funding Scheme

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HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC Grants

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Call for proposal

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(opens in new window) ERC-2024-COG

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Host institution

TARTU ULIKOOL
Net EU contribution

Net EU financial contribution. The sum of money that the participant receives, deducted by the EU contribution to its linked third party. It considers the distribution of the EU financial contribution between direct beneficiaries of the project and other types of participants, like third-party participants.

€ 1 990 195,00
Address
ULIKOOLI 18
51005 TARTU
Estonia

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Region
Eesti Eesti Lõuna-Eesti
Activity type
Higher or Secondary Education Establishments
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Total cost

The total costs incurred by this organisation to participate in the project, including direct and indirect costs. This amount is a subset of the overall project budget.

€ 1 990 195,00

Beneficiaries (1)

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