Regime destabilization in energy transitions: The German debate on the future of coal

By A. Leipprand, C. Flachsland. Energy Research & Social Science, 2018

133 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract Greenhouse gas emissions are stagnating in Germany despite increasing deployment of renewable energy. This makes the government’s Energiewende appear inconsistent and has triggered a discussion on phasing-out coal. The focus has thus turned from niche technology development to the destabilization of the existing high-carbon regime. In this paper we investigate stakeholders’ framings and their perceptions of different policy options to advance the understanding of regime destabilization processes and theory-building in the context of the multi-level perspective (MLP) on socio-technical transitions. We find that actors still form coalitions with traditional allies and cling to established lines of reasoning, although there are indications for a beginning disintegration of the status quo-defending coalition. In their framings, core actors emphasize risks and threats. This confirms that regime destabilization is particularly conflictual and shows that for actors pushing regime change it is more difficult to offer a positive story. Linking policies for phasing-out incumbent technologies to accompanying measures for managing structural change in affected regions may facilitate compromise. The results moreover point to a tension between national and supra-national action as a core issue in destabilization debates. Our insights are relevant for countries in similar transition phases and may inform future comparative research.

Subfields: General Energy, Political Science and International Relations

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/632a43fb209ac242055c924bd69b3c510703d19a

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Citations in the corpus

The political economy of coal in Poland: Drivers and barriers for a shift away from fossil fuels (2020, unknown): “…allows us to apply a political economy perspective to understand the particularities of the Polish situation (see also Newell and Paterson (1998), Levy and Newell (2002) and Newell (2018)), and nevertheless include technology developments and the country specific societal context as relevant…”
Lessons from Germany’s hard coal mining phase-out: policies and transition from 1950 to 2018 (2019, background): “Thus, the inclusion of regional aspects of social and structural policy into the phase-out of fossil fuels is a necessity for addressing (mostly local) resistance (Brauers et al., 2018; Leipprand & Flachsland, 2018; Sartor, 2018).”