Managing the Transition to a Low-Carbon Economy

Abstract

The previous chapter has shown that moving to a low-carbon economy is not just a technological issue, but necessarily involves changes across the whole of a society. As a consequence, managing such a transition requires more than just decisions about which technologies to support, and is likely to need wide ranging institutional adaptations. This realisation has led to the development and elaboration of such concepts as ‘socio-technical regimes’, ‘transition management’, ‘reflexive governance’ and ‘adaptive capacity’. These ideas are of direct relevance to the challenge of managing the transition to a low-carbon economy and, indeed, in many cases have been developed in this specific context.