Abstract
Economic development, technological innovation, and policy change are especially prominent factors shaping energy transitions. Therefore explaining energy transitions requires combining insights from disciplines investigating these factors. The existing literature is not consistent in identifying these disciplines nor proposing how they can be combined. We conceptualize national energy transitions as a co-evolution of three types of systems: energy flows and markets, energy technologies, and energy-related policies. The focus on the three types of systems gives rise to three perspectives on national energy transitions: techno-economic with its roots in energy systems analysis and various domains of economics; socio-technical with its roots in sociology of technology, STS, and evolutionary economics; and political with its roots in political science. We use the three perspectives as an organizing principle to propose a meta-theoretical framework for analyzing national energy transitions. Following Elinor Ostrom's approach, the proposed framework explains national energy transitions through a nested conceptual map of variables and theories. In comparison with the existing meta-theoretical literature, the three perspectives framework elevates the role of political science since policies are likely to be increasingly prominent in shaping 21st century energy transitions.
Highlights
The ways societies use energy have changed over the course of history, are changing at present, and will certainly change in the future
She believed that an important function of a framework was to provide a ‘metatheoretic language’ through which various theories could communicate with each other ([69], p. 826). This idea echoes Turnheim’s et al.’s [7] ‘dialogue of analytical approaches’. We consider this approach suitable for studies of national energy transitions because (1) it deals with co-evolving systems, (2) it aspires to create a meta-theoretical framework; and (3) it is based on the experience of organizing interaction of economists, sociologists and political scientists, i.e. much the same disciplines as should be involved in analyzing energy transitions
These limitations exist because technological innovation and diffusion as well as policies originate in systems different from energyeconomy systems which are the focus of the techno-economic perspective
Summary
The ways societies use energy have changed over the course of history, are changing at present, and will certainly change in the future. Be ‘low-carbon’ or ‘sustainable’), they are clearly not identical, and are not necessarily explained by the same theories With respect to their method, the existing meta-theoretical reviews range from inductive accounts of history of thought [4,6] to bibliographical studies centered on several influential papers [5], to deductive analyses based on the nature of the problem in question [9,11,6]. We include such transitions in the scope of our analysis because we believe that the mechanisms of energy transitions depend more on their scale and depth than on their normatively evaluated direction or effects.3 Though it sets us apart from some transition studies which are primarily interested in ‘green’ technologies, it is in line with most long-term scenarios of climate change mitigation, which typically envision deploying a wide range of technologies ranging from carbon capture and storage (CCS) and nuclear power to hydrogen, biomass, renewables, and energy efficiency [15].
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