Sociotechnical transitions for deep decarbonization

By Frank W. Geels, Benjamin Sovacool, Tim Schwanen, S. Sorrell. Science, 2017

825 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Accelerating innovation is as important as climate policy Rapid and deep reductions in greenhouse gas emission are needed to avoid dangerous climate change. This will necessitate low-carbon transitions across electricity, transport, heat, industrial, forestry, and agricultural systems. But despite recent rapid growth in renewable electricity generation, the rate of progress toward this wider goal of deep decarbonization remains slow. Moreover, many policy-oriented energy and climate researchers and models remain wedded to disciplinary approaches that focus on a single piece of the low-carbon transition puzzle, yet avoid many crucial real-world elements for accelerated transitions (1). We present a “sociotechnical” framework to address the multidimensionality of the deep decarbonization challenge and show how coevolutionary interactions between technologies and societal groups can accelerate low-carbon transitions.

Subfields: Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Environmental Engineering, Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/5b4d3b67f6dc6253b53d679c4a08d10ef3695ec5

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Citations in the corpus

Evaluating process-based integrated assessment models of climate change mitigation (2017, background): “Process-based IAMs have also been criticised for a range of perceived failings, including technological hubris (Anderson and Peters 2016), omitted drivers of sociotechnical change (Geels et al. 2017), and understating future uncertainties (Rosen and Guenther 2015).”
Climate finance and disclosure for institutional investors: why transparency is not enough (2019, background): “The “multi-level” perspective (MLP) pioneered by Geels (2002), summarised and applied to deep decarbonisation in Geels et al. (2017) considers indeed sociotechnical systems as a cluster of elements, involving technology, science, regulations, user practices, markets, cultural meaning,…”
Reducing energy demand through low carbon innovation: A sociotechnical transitions perspective and thirteen research debates (2018, background): “The rate and scale of change required is best described as revolutionary: there are few historical precedents and existing policy initiatives have achieved only incremental progress towards those ends [3].”
Intersectionality and energy transitions: A review of gender, social equity and low-carbon energy (2020, background): “Some of these streams explore the socio-technical challenge of transitioning whole energy systems towards sustainability [4,5] by confronting incumbent energy policies [6,7], diffusing new low-carbon – or renewable – energy technologies [8,9], establishing new value chains and business models [10,11”
Why achieving the Paris Agreement requires reduced overall consumption and production (2018, background): “Production and consumption are interdependent elements in a socio-technical system (Geels et al. 2017; Jensen 2017; Lebel and Lorek 2008).”
Designing an effective climate-policy mix: accounting for instrument synergy (2021, background): “A third challenge for climate policy is the problem of social, economic and political lock-in of undesirable (high-carbon) technologies and practices or lifestyles (Geels et al., 2017).”
Carbon pricing and deep decarbonisation (2018, background): “Preventing carbon lock-in through long-lived capital assets may necessitate additional interventions, such as technology phase-outs (Geels et al., 2017), yet research into the design, effects and interactions of such policies has lagged far behind the study of carbon pricing itself.”