Conditions and intervention strategies for the deliberate acceleration of socio-technical transitions: lessons from a comparative multi-level analysis of two historical case studies in Dutch and Danish heating

ABSTRACT

Policy-oriented transition frameworks such as Strategic Niche Management, Transition Management, and Technological Innovation Systems offer limited analytical traction on deliberately accelerated socio-technical transitions. Using the Multi-Level Perspective as guiding framework, we therefore inductively explore the political acceleration of socio-technical transitions by investigating two deliberately accelerated heating transitions: the transition from coal and oil to natural gas in the Netherlands (1948–1973), and the transition from oil to district heating in Denmark (1945–1990), to draw lessons about the conditions and intervention strategies that facilitate rapid socio-technical change. We find that both cases were characterised by weakened regimes, stabilised niche-innovations, focusing events, and consensus between policymakers and business actors. User resistance was also low in both cases, partly because of public policies. Different focusing events in each case produced problem-driven versus opportunity-driven transition pathways; the former destabilised existing regimes but generated future-oriented uncertainty, while the latter facilitated rapid closure.

KEYWORDS:

• Socio-technical transitions
• deliberate acceleration
• policy
• sustainability transitions
• multi-level perspective

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to the Research Councils United Kingdom (RCUK) Energy Program Grant EP/K011790/1 “Centre on Innovation and Energy Demand,” which has funded the research that presented in this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Cameron Roberts is a Research Fellow, currently working on the political economy of transport provision on the Living Well within Limits project, at the School of Earth and Environment at the University of Leeds. Previously, he has worked on the deliberate acceleration of transitions to sustainability, and on the role of public discourse in socio-technical transitions.

Frank W. Geels is Professor of System Innovation and Sustainability at the Sustainable Consumption Institute (SCI) and the Manchester Institute of Innovation Research (MIoIR) at the University of Manchester. He is chairman of the international Sustainability Transitions Research Network (www.transitionsnetwork.org), and one of the world-leading scholars on socio-technical transitions and system innovation.

Notes

1 The fourth perspective considered by Markard et al. is the multi-level perspective, which is more descriptive than prescriptive and will be discussed in section 2.2 as an analytical basis for the rest of this paper.

2 While Danish natural gas from the North Sea was theoretically another possible alternative, as it had been discovered by 1973, the first industrial drilling did not occur until 1983, too late to make a big difference in the Danish domestic heating market (Statistics Denmark 2016a).

Additional information

Funding

The authors are grateful to the Research Councils United Kingdom (RCUK) Energy Program Grant EP/K011790/1 “Centre on Innovation and Energy Demand,” which has funded the research that presented in this paper.