**7. Conclusions**

Existing literature in STR postulates the resistance from incumbent regime actors to transition, APDST, the emergen<sup>t</sup> approach in STR, assumes the support from incumbent regime actors as policymakers enact the change. This research elaborates further on what makes the incumbent regime actors, mainly from the industry and business, support APDST, and how their strategies influence each other in the face of externalities hindering the transition

This study reinstates the significance and potential of APDST in the addressing pressing environmental challenge.

We find that support from incumbent actors is not only due to the compliance towards enacted policies. The past and present relationship between industrial-political actors and anticipated co-benefits through transitioning influences actor strategies in response to APDST. Yet, sustaining the support from incumbent regime actors needs continued efforts from the governmen<sup>t</sup> due to the challenges incurred in transitioning.

Though policy implementation challenges are often regarded as outcomes of failed policy coordination and coherence [5,110], this research finds that if systemic interdependencies, unforeseen externalities, and non-negotiable transition timelines revealing power asymmetries are not addressed sufficiently then, some actors could not fulfil the requirements within the pre-determined timeline, and can make the success of APDST questionable.

We recommend accounting for the dynamic positioning of the regime actors to deepen the understanding of the challenges of implementing APDST. This can enable a more reflexive approach towards sustainability transition that revisits the changing capacities and needs of the actors, internal and external influences, and can adapt the transition timelines accordingly. In the absence of a carefully planned APDST, the success of transition can be questionable.

Along with contributing to the recognized research gap on the implementation of APDST, this research provides empirical evidence on the dynamism of actors during transition trajectories, which hitherto remain largely unaccounted. The research method of Twitter data analysis provides an alternative to study the process of transitioning in real-time. Moreover, this study also contributes to the geographic diversity of the STR by drawing insights of APSDT in emerging economies.

The limitation of this research is twofold. Firstly, conclusions are primarily drawn based on the stated position of actors rather than their actual positions. The study partly addressed such a limitation through data triangulation, but due to the specificity of the empirical case, a limited number of data were available for triangulation. Secondly, the study only assessed the positions of well-recognised actors mentioned in the literature. In particular, the actor strategies of informal sector actors are under-represented.

As a way forward, studies in STR considering using social media analysis can benefit from combining it with interviews to verify the actor's stated position. Combining other forms of data collection to include informal sector actors [34] is highly recommended. We relied on Twitter's standard API for data collection, which capped the number of data collected. A more extensive database could contribute to strengthening these research findings.

**Author Contributions:** Conceptualisation, A.K.; methodology, A.K. and N.M.; data collection and analysis, A.K.; writing—original draft preparation, A.K. and A.W.; writing—review and editing, A.K., A.W., and N.M.; visualisation, A.K.; funding acquisition, A.W. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.

**Funding:** The Environment Research and Technology Development Fund (S-16-3: JPMEERF16S11630) of the Environmental Restoration and Conservation Agency of Japan, funded the development of this manuscript.

**Institutional Review Board Statement:** Ethical review and approval were waived for this study. The data used in this research were based on publicly available published data collected from secondary governmen<sup>t</sup> sources, news articles and from Twitter. Twitter data was collected with approval, using a standard application programming interface (API). Apart from Twitter, no permissions were needed or sought, and there are no ethical issues raised by this work as defined by the University of Oxford's Research Ethics.

**Informed Consent Statement:** Not applicable.

**Data Availability Statement:** No new data were created or analyzed in this study. Data sharing is not applicable to this article.

**Conflicts of Interest:** The authors declare no conflict of interest.
