Normative expectations of government as a policy actor: the case of UK steel industry decarbonisation

ABSTRACT

The literature on technological expectations finds these to be performative: mobilising, coordinating and directing investment and decision-making. Expectations can involve conditionality and be normative, empirical or realist; that is, they may concern what should happen or what is considered likely. Expectations may also be of a form involving conditionality. Here we examine the interrelated role of normative, empirical and conditional expectations, their function in managing expectations relating to techno-science policy, and their implications for how stakeholders state that they perceive their agency and locus of control. Looking at UK steel industry decarbonisation, we show how stakeholders direct both their normative expectations and direct their locus of control towards the Government, as a form of strategic positioning. Commercial actors state the policy responses that they expect of the UK government mostly relate to reducing costs. We comment on actors’ arguably strategic appeals to normative expectations that displace responsibility from themselves, and the Government's potential role in terms of intervention.

KEYWORDS:

• Conditionality
• industrial decarbonisation
• sociotechnical expectations
• steel industry
• rhetoric

Acknowledgement

The authors thank the stakeholders participating in this research for their time and valuable insights. Access to research data is restricted and respondents are anonymised for confidentiality. The research presented in this article formed part of the project ‘Complete decarbonisation of the UK steel industry’, funded through the Centre for Research in Energy Demand Solutions (CREDS). CREDS is funded by UK Research and Innovation, grant agreement number EP/R035288/1. The authors are most grateful for this support.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Various qualifications can be made to technical decarbonization claims in this context. These include the consideration that it is often not possible to completely replace coke with biomass in current blast furnace designs, given the lower compressive strength of biomass. Blast furnaces designed for use with biomass have to be far shorter than those designed for coke. Hence, with legacy blast furnaces, only partial substitution of biomass is possible. Moreover, use of (in the UK, imported) biomass is controversial, with its sustainability being contested. Further discussion of partial substitution of coke with biomass is available in H. Mandova et al., ‘Possibilities for Co2 Emission Reduction Using Biomass in European Integrated Steel Plants’, Biomass and Bioenergy, 115 (2018/08/01/2018), 231–43.

2 Arguably with some justification, given the precarity of the sector – we discuss this later.

3 Integrated plants are those that convert ore to iron, then to steel, and further on to other semi-finished or finished products.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Centre for Research in Energy Demand Solutions (CREDS). Grant agreement number EP/R035288/1.