Research posture, stated plainly
Transitions Lab exists to answer one set of questions with the rigour they deserve: when new infrastructure systems — payment rails, electric vehicles, water networks, climate-adaptation platforms — move from pilot into widespread use in an emerging-market economy, what actually carries them across the threshold, and what keeps them back?
The question matters because the public discourse on infrastructure transitions is shaped heavily by success stories and cautionary tales, and very little by the middle ground where most real transitions sit. A mobile-money network that reaches eight in ten adults in Kenya and remains a closed loop. An electric-motorcycle fleet that grows thirty-fold in three years and still cannot be serviced at any petrol station. A water-kiosk network that delivers reliably in one county and fails the moment a caretaker relocates. Each of these is the middle ground. Each of these is where the Lab works.
Three research programmes are active at the time of writing — finance and payment systems, electrification and e-mobility, and water access systems. A fourth programme on climate-adaptation infrastructure is in preparation, and a long-running body of applied work on marine monitoring sits alongside these as operational substrate. The programmes overview explains how the four relate.
How the Lab organises its work
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What do successful transitions have in common across sectors?
The Lab's working hypothesis is that transitions across apparently different sectors — payment systems, electric mobility, water provision — share a small set of structural problems: the reproduction of closed-loop architectures at the infrastructure layer, the friction at the interfaces between new and legacy systems, and the mismatch between fine-grained daily cash-flow patterns and coarse-grained transfer mechanisms. We develop this cross-sectoral reading in each programme.
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How do emerging technologies navigate around entrenched systems?
The Lab's signature methodological contribution is the bypass–repurpose–weaken (BRW) typology of niche-navigation strategies. The typology distinguishes three distinct ways a new infrastructure system can proceed against an entrenched legacy regime, identifies the conditions under which each strategy is viable, and provides a working vocabulary for comparing transitions across sectors. A full methodological treatment is available.
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What is the shape of a fair transition at scale?
Transitions are not inherently fair, and the Lab's research posture treats fairness as a design question rather than an outcome to be hoped for. Who is allowed into the new system, on what terms, at what cost — these are the substantive questions of the Lab's policy and deployment-design work, developed in the regulatory frameworks entry and in the individual programme pages.
Featured research
For a reader arriving fresh, the Lab's work reads most coherently in the order below.
The BRW Typology of niche-navigation strategies
The Lab's distinctive methodological contribution — a three-strategy framework for analysing how new infrastructure systems navigate entrenched legacy regimes. Full methodology, theoretical grounding, and applied examples.
Read the methodology →Electrification & E-Mobility Transitions
How electric two-wheelers are crossing the affordability threshold in Kenya's ICE-dominated motorcycle market, what financing architectures are doing the work, and what the transition tells us about infrastructure change more broadly.
Read the programme →Finance & Payment Systems
Why payment-rail lock-in is the most important under-discussed problem in digital financial inclusion, how closed-loop mobile-money architectures reproduce it, and what durable interoperability at the payment layer would require.
Read the programme →Water Access Systems
Vendor-mediated, caretaker-brokered water distribution in Nairobi and peri-urban Kenya — and what the financing and payment lessons from mobile money imply for a sector that still runs on sacks of coins.
Read the programme →The Four Financing Architectures
A structured analysis of pay-as-you-go, ride-to-own, battery-as-a-service, and concessional climate finance — the four distinct architectures that have emerged in African e-mobility and their implications for the payment layer beneath.
Read the analysis →Articles, briefs, and working papers
The Lab publishes its work openly. Long-form articles, research briefs, field notes, and policy notes are indexed and versioned. New writing is added throughout the year.
Browse the index →The Lab's writing is long-form by default, argument-driven, and footnoted where the evidence warrants. Entries stand alone; each can be read without the others, though the signature BRW methodology appears across programmes and gains depth when read in combination.
The tone throughout is that of a research organisation — not a consultancy marketing site, not an advocacy platform, and not a set of personal essays. The reader is assumed to be an informed professional: a grant programme officer, a fellow researcher, a practitioner in the field, or a peer reviewer.
For a structured account of the Lab's mission and approach, see About. For the full programme overview, see Programmes. For direct contact, see Contact.