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The contemporary, institutional conception of sustainability is often presented as compatible with economic growth agendas. The resulting ‘sustainability’ transitions, narrowly focus on technological solutions that perpetuate incumbent system dynamics and their worldviews. Traditional-ecological knowledge, alternative knowledge systems, and cosmologies that might offer more holistic transition approaches and views of sustainability are marginalised in mainstream policy discourse & discussions. This study aims to identify and critically examine dominant sustainability narratives framing energy transition policies to explore how these narratives influence policy-making, technological adoption, and their implications for sustainability discourse, the philosophy of science, and environmental politics.

Adopting qualitative and interpretive methods and a non-experimental single case study design, this work examines the water-energy nexus in the Canary Islands policy debate on (renewable-powered) desalination. Employing the Narrative Policy Framework (NPF), it investigates the role of Policy Narratives in the Energy Transition process of the Archipelago to demonstrate how ‘stories’ (policy narratives) are strategically employed in policy discourse, linking them to belief-value systems and epistemologies that influence decision-making processes and obscure alternative, possibly truly sustainable, worldviews. 

A paradigm shift is called for, one that moves beyond exclusively techno-economic fixes and integrates frameworks of socio-ecological change that go beyond being mere tools of demand-response/adapting to supply shifts; one that recognizes the interconnectedness between the human and non-human and includes more explicitly the immateriality of transitions.