Derk Loorbach got  his paper on the basics of transition management published in Governance, titled: Transition Management for Sustainable Development; a prescriptive, complexity based governance framework. In this paper, the basic rationale behind transition management is introduced for the governance and policy research community. Based on the idea of society as patchwork of open, complex adaptive systems, the governance principles are formulated of a network based and transition oriented approach. This is then translated in a framework enabling implementation of specific ‘management’ strategies to deal with transitions. Of these management strategies, the transition arena is a central example presented in this paper.