Policy mixes for incumbency: Exploring the destructive recreation of renewable energy, shale gas ‘fracking,’ and nuclear power in the United Kingdom
By P. Johnstone, Andrew Stirling, Benjamin Sovacool. 2017
129 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Abstract The notion of a ‘policy mix’ can describe interactions across a wide range of innovation policies, including ‘motors for creation’ as well as for ‘destruction’. This paper focuses on the United Kingdom’s (UK) ‘new policy direction’ that has weakened support for renewables and energy efficiency schemes while strengthening promotion of nuclear power and hydraulic fracturing for natural gas (‘fracking’). The paper argues that a ‘policy apparatus for incumbency’ is emerging which strengthens key regime-based technologies while arguably damaging emerging niche innovations. Basing the discussion around the three technology-based cases of renewable energy and efficiency, fracking, and nuclear power, this paper refers to this process as “destructive recreation”. Our study raises questions over the extent to which policymaking in the energy field is not so much driven by stated aims around sustainability transitions, as by other policy drivers. It investigates different ‘strategies of incumbency’ including ‘securitization’, ‘masking’, ‘reinvention’, and ‘capture.’ It suggests that analytical frameworks should extend beyond the particular sectors in focus, with notions of what counts as a relevant ‘policy maker’ correspondingly also expanded, in order to explore a wider range of nodes and critical junctures as entry points for understanding how relations of incumbency are forged and reproduced.
Subfields: Global and Planetary Change, Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/2e43aefa6dfe3040c061bb7020e13f1b29cf9de8
How researchers see this paper
The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.
In Global and Planetary Change
- F. Kern
- Karoline S. Rogge
- D. Edmondson
- Michael Howlett
- Benjamin Sovacool
- Frank W. Geels
- David Popp
- J. Schleich
In Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment
Citations in the corpus
- The co-evolution of policy mixes and socio-technical systems: Towards a conceptual framework of policy mix feedback in sustainability transitions (2019, background): “become entangled, often resulting in a high level of influence of incumbent actors on policy decisions (Meadowcroft 2011; Johnstone et al. 2017).”