Governing sustainable energy-mobility transitions: multi-level policy mixes, transformative capacities and low-carbon innovations

ongoing

In its recent 1.5°C report the IPCC stressed that global efforts to promote low-carbon transitions need to be accelerated to meet the Paris Agreement. This raises a number of questions for the emerging field of policy mixes for sustainability transitions, such as on the role of actors and multi-level governance in politically contested socio-technical transition processes. In this project, I aim to address these knowledge gaps by asking how low-carbon transitions in the increasingly interconnected energy and mobility systems as major contributors to greenhouse gas emissions can be accelerated. EMPOCI has three objectives: Objective 1: To provide a novel conceptual and empirical understanding of the global interplay between multi-level policy mixes and low-carbon innovations in socio-technical transitions which foregrounds the role of actors and transformative capacity. -> By bridging the innovation and policy studies literatures and comparatively analyzing the increasingly interconnected electricity-mobility-ICT systems in four key countries, EMPOCI will advance the research frontier on transformative policy mixes for low-carbon transitions. Objective 2: To develop and test widely applicable novel methodological tools enabling both deep and broad insights into the drivers and barriers in unfolding multi-sectoral transition processes towards sustainability. -> Drawing on a multi-method research design EMPOCI will provide novel standards for assessing policy, agency and innovation dynamics in politically contested low-carbon transition processes (e.g. survey, big data). Objective 3: To co-design practically relevant multi-actor strategies for accelerating sustainable energy-mobility transitions, thereby supporting the Paris Agreement in combating climate change. -> Based on EMPOCI's findings a transformative foresight process is organized with stakeholders from business, policy, academia and society to jointly derive implications for transformative policy mixes.