The tipping point concept, widely recognized within the natural sciences, is experiencing a resurgence in social studies. The emerging field sees growing insights about characteristics and mechanisms of social system tipping; however, much disagreement remains. This includes whether social tipping points can be anticipated – determining its political relevance, as anticipation is essential for actions to intentionally trigger tipping. We address this disagreement and propose a framework which operationalises socio-technical tipping across subsystems and elements to anticipate tipping points, illustrated in two case comparisons. We show that whereas the transition to electric cars in Germany has started but is not about to tip, especially not regarding normative and regulatory regime factors, the same transition in Norway is about to tip, but still requires international car markets to tip before the sectoral transition is tipped and complete. Similarly, we show that the transition to a PV-based renewable power system in Germany has progressed strongly, both regarding technology and regime factors, but the system has not yet tipped: further efforts reforming infrastructure and regulation are essential. Hence, our findings emphasise the notion that while technological progress holds significance, it represents only one facet among several that must align for a system to undergo a tipping point.

中文翻译：

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预测社会技术临界点


在自然科学中得到广泛认可的引爆点概念正在社会研究中复兴。这个新兴领域对社会系统倾销的特征和机制的见解越来越多;然而，仍然存在很多分歧。这包括是否可以预测社会临界点——确定其政治相关性，因为预期对于有意触发小费的行动至关重要。我们解决了这一分歧，并提出了一个框架，该框架跨子系统和元素实施社会技术小费以预测临界点，如两个案例比较所示。我们表明，虽然德国向电动汽车的过渡已经开始，但不会倾斜，尤其是在规范和监管制度因素方面，挪威的同样过渡即将倾斜，但仍需要国际汽车市场在行业过渡结束和完成之前倾斜。同样，我们表明，德国向光伏可再生能源系统的过渡在技术和制度因素方面都取得了强劲进展，但该系统尚未倾斜：进一步努力改革基础设施和监管是必不可少的。因此，我们的研究结果强调了这样一个概念，即虽然技术进步具有重要意义，但它只代表了系统经历临界点必须协调的几个方面中的一个。