Historical institutionalism and the politics of sustainable energy transitions: A research agenda

By M. Lockwood, C. Kuzemko, C. Mitchell, R. Hoggett. 2017

232 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Improving the understanding of the politics of sustainable energy transitions has become a major focus for research. This paper builds on recent interest in institutionalist approaches to consider in some depth the agenda arising from a historical institutionalist perspective on such transitions. It is argued that historical institutionalism is a valuable complement to socio-technical systems approaches, offering tools for the explicit analysis of institutional dynamics that are present but implicit in the latter framework, opening up new questions and providing useful empirical material relevant for the study of the wider political contexts within which transitions are emerging. Deploying a number of core concepts including veto players, power, unintended consequences, and positive and negative feedback in a variety of ways, the paper explores research agendas in two broad areas: understanding diversity in transition outcomes in terms of the effects of different institutional arrangements, and the understanding of transitions in terms of institutional development and change. A range of issues are explored, including: the roles of electoral and political institutions, regulatory agencies, the creation of politically credible commitment to transition policies, power and incumbency, institutional systems and varieties of capitalism, sources of regime stability and instability, policy feedback effects, and types of gradual institutional change. The paper concludes with some observations on the potential and limitations of historical institutionalism, and briefly considers the question of whether there may be specific institutional configurations that would facilitate more rapid sustainable energy transitions.

Subfields: General Energy, Global and Planetary Change, Strategy and Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/37a8a0d0509bcf8dbac4e7959c3fc9ca0b11616c

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In General Energy

1. J. Jewell
2. Jon Phillips
3. A. Cherp
4. Lucy Baker
5. Benjamin Sovacool
6. Vlado Vivoda
7. P. Newell
8. Christian Breyer

In Global and Planetary Change

1. Benjamin Sovacool
2. V. Vinichenko
3. Lucy Baker
4. Jon Phillips
5. Elina Brutschin
6. A. Cherp
7. J. Jewell

In Strategy and Management

1. V. Vinichenko
2. Lucy Baker
3. Jon Phillips
4. Elina Brutschin
5. Benjamin Sovacool
6. A. Cherp
7. J. Jewell

Citations in the corpus

• Integrating techno-economic, socio-technical and political perspectives on national energy transitions: A meta-theoretical framework (2018, background): “More generally, scholars have developed a theoretical argument for the importance of historical institutionalism for energy transition studies as a complement to sociological institutionalism [125] or to socio-technical analysis [126].”
• The political logics of clean energy transitions (2018, unknown): “(2011); Lovering et al. (2016). 24 Weiss et al. (2010); Rubin et al. (2015). 25 Nemet (2006). 26 Neij (1997). 28 Rubin et al. (2015). 496 Hanna Breetz, Matto Mildenberger and Leah Stokes”
• Tensions in the transition: The politics of electricity distribution in South Africa (2018, methodology): “We use the South African case study to advance understandings of how politics matters for energy transitions (Bouzarovski et al., 2017; Lockwood et al., 2017) and to consider questions of power, politics, equity and socio-economic welfare that remain under represented in research on energy…”