Mainstream sustainability transition frameworks—Multi-Level Perspective (MLP), Technological Innovation Systems (TIS), Strategic Niche Management (SNM), and Transition Management (TM)—effectively guide socio-technical change but their capacity to incorporate deeper ethical, paradigmatic, and cosmological perspectives remains limited. This article introduces the Taoist-inspired Deep and Shallow Sustainability Intervention (DSSI) framework as a meta-coordinating lens to address these gaps. By mapping DSSI’s ten leverage points against the core logics of MLP, TIS, SNM, and TM, the analysis reveals both synergies and blind spots across shallow and deep intervention realms. The study demonstrates how integrating DSSI can reframe transitions beyond technical and institutional optimisation, foregrounding ethical reflection, systemic interdependence, and long-term ecological alignment. These insights advance sustainability transitions research within a post-normal science context, showing how structured, action-oriented approaches can be complemented with reflexive, ethically grounded, and philosophically informed interventions, capable of guiding truly responsible and transformative change.
Liang et al. (Sun,) studied this question.