Conceptualising multi-regime interactions: The role of the agriculture sector in renewable energy transitions
By Lee-Ann Sutherland, Sarah Peter, L. Zagata. 2015
134 citations recorded by the source corpus.
The agriculture sector plays an important role in renewable energy transitions, owing to its historical involvement in managing key resources, particularly land and biomass. We develop the multi-level perspective in relation to these emergent transition processes, conceptualising transitions towards renewable electricity production as examples of multi-regime interaction between national-level agriculture and electricity regimes. We focus particularly on the role of niche ‘anchoring’ into multiple regimes as the mechanism through which multi-regime interaction occurs, utilising case studies in Germany, the Czech Republic and the United Kingdom. Analysis suggests the birth of a new ‘fiat’ regime, oriented towards renewable electricity production. We suggest that fiat regimes, which are heavily dependent on policy supports, are often multifunctional in nature. In addition, we argue that agriculture’s inherent connection to land demonstrates one of the specific characteristics of ‘fiat regimes’: fiat regimes are constructed largely in response to policy efforts to produce or protect public goods, such as natural resources, as opposed to ‘market regimes’ based on technological developments. Findings demonstrate support for the ‘special case’ of the agriculture sector in transition processes: high degrees of policy involvement led to ‘windows of opportunity’ created largely in response to national and international policy agendas, and the multiple functions of agriculture were reflected in competition between agriculture and electricity sectors over natural resource access. As renewable energy currently represents a secondary transition in the agriculture sector, we suggest that further attention needs to be paid to the impact of fiat regime policies on secondary transition processes.
Subfields: Global and Planetary Change, Pollution, Sociology and Political Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/465b566b945988de06f3e47dee2806fe5aa1fe36
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In Global and Planetary Change
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Citations in the corpus
- Transition heuristic frameworks in research on agro-food sustainability transitions (2020, background): “Other papers deal with different regimes and address the interface between agriculture and energy (Slingerland and Schut 2014; Sutherland et al. 2015; Nygaard and Bolwig 2018) or health care (Hassink et al.”
- The Multi-Level Perspective in Research on Sustainability Transitions in Agriculture and Food Systems: A Systematic Review (2019, background): “Some of the selected papers deal with multi-regimes and address the interface between agriculture and energy [71,95,107,108], nature [97] or healthcare [87–89].”
- Systemic perspectives on scaling agricultural innovations. A review (2016, background): “It is a perspective that is increasingly applied in the context of agriculture (e.g. Blesh and Wolf 2014; Diaz et al. 2013; Elzen et al. 2011, 2012; Hinrichs 2014; Ingram 2015; Lamine 2011; Morrissey et al. 2014; Sutherland et al. 2015).”