How to make a transition towards sustainable mobility happen : an exploration of theories. The tension between economy, accessibility, quality of life and sustainability has taken such a shape that a transition towards sustainable mobility seems to be inevitable. This creates a massive challenge for the Transumo program, designed for intensive research on this transition, in finding answers to questions concerning the contents, what will this transition look like, what will be the results, but also with respect to how this can be achieved. In this article the results are presented of a first exploration of theories on the how issue. The analysis shows that existing organisational and public administrational theories seem to have shortcomings because they lack a necessary integral, synthetic perspective. These theories deal with structure or humans whilst an overcoming perspective is believed to be crucial to connect both sides. This connection is expected to be a precondition for the creation of a broad, societal movement towards sustainability. A rather recent theory, Courage to Connect® is described that offers initial steps towards such an overcoming approach. Central element in this theory is ‘seeing’ as the overcoming capacity of the core antithesis in people and in organisations, the one between reason and emotion or between hard and soft issues. Such an approach appears to be applicable to the domain of traffic and transport and the desired transition as well and offers a perspective on results. The approach urges for research in practise instead of research on practise since it seems to bring closer a breakthrough in the too unilateral rational or emotional research practise. The overcoming ‘seeing’ is believed to be an elementary tool for a right problem description as a proper start of the solution like Einstein said. (Author/publisher)
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