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This paper aims at presenting the theoretical concepts of the transdisciplinary case study approach (TCS), which is a research and teaching approach developed and elaborated at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH), as a means of transition support.

The paper reveals the historical roots of case studies, transdisciplinarity and sustainable development as teaching and research paradigms. The TCS approach is presented, which has been developed at ETH for supporting transition management of regional, urban, and organizational systems. This approach is entrenched by an ontology that reveals the basic characteristics of ill‐defined transition problems, an epistemology that refers to Probabilistic Functionalism and distinguishes between multi‐layered systemic and normative epistemics, a methodology that includes a set of methods for case representation …