Restructuring energy systems for sustainability? Energy transition policy in the Netherlands

By F. Kern, Adrian Smith. 2008

526 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Increasingly, researchers and policy makers are confronting the challenge of restructuring energy systems into more sustainable forms. A 'transition management' model, and its adoption in the Netherlands, is attracting attention. Starting from the socio-technical multi-level theory that informs 'transition management', we analyse the 'energy transition' project carried out by the Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs. Despite considerable achievements, their approach risks capture by the incumbent energy regime, thereby undermining original policy ambitions for structural innovation of the energy system. This experience presents generic dilemmas for transitions approaches.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Global and Planetary Change, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/71fa3cf8c05692633948b8f8c9ca3678abca3095

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Citations in the corpus

The political economy of the ‘just transition’ (2013, background): “In academic circles the term derives from a set of literatures on ‘socio-technical’ transitions (Geels 2005; Geels and Schot 2007) that are also increasingly being applied to questions of energy policy and politics (Scarse and Smith 2009; Kern and Smith 2008).”
Compulsive policy-making—The evolution of the German feed-in tariff system for solar photovoltaic power (2014, background): “Politicians anchored in an existing regime are unlikely to show strong support for emerging technologies and may resist related political initiatives (Kern and Smith, 2008).”
Evolutionary approaches for sustainable innovation policies: From niche to paradigm? (2009, background): “energy transition who developed pressure on government to reorganise policies and combine them (Kern and Smith, 2007).”
Discursive regime dynamics in the Dutch energy transition (2014, unknown): “With that, the Dutch energy system was one of the first where transition management – a new governance approach for sustainability (Loorbach, 2007; Rotmans et al., 2001) – was applied in an integral manner (Kemp, 2010; Kern and Smith, 2008; Loorbach et al., 2008; Smith and Kern, 2009).”
The Political Economy of Energy Transitions: The Case of South Africa (2014, background): “National electricity plans potentially provide an opportunity to provide precisely the sort of integrated goal-oriented management plan that TM literatures would encourage and which have been analysed in the case of the Netherlands (Kern and Smith 2008).”
A Comparison of Energy Transition Governance in Germany, The Netherlands and the United Kingdom (2014, background): “Some integration between the ETP transition platforms has been achieved; however Kern and Smith [36] point out that the impact of the ETP on core Dutch energy policy issues, such as security of supply, liberalization, renewable energy, and nuclear power has been very limited.”
Assessing the Dutch Energy Transition Policy: How Does it Deal with Dilemmas of Managing Transitions? (2007, background): “The transition platforms form the heart of the transition (Aubert, interviewed in Kern & Smith, 2007) and their activities are described further on.”
Keeping sustainable innovation on a leash? Exploring incumbents’ institutional strategies (2015, background): “Several authors show that incumbents have been able to (partially) capture the Dutch energy transition initiatives, which has reduced the potential for change (Avelino, 2009; Kern and Smith, 2008; Scrase and Smith, 2009; Voß et al., 2009).”
Transition Governance towards a Bioeconomy: A Comparison of Finland and The Netherlands (2016, background): “It has been extensively documented and investigated [17,27,45].”
The transitions storyline in Dutch environmental policy (2009, background): “…are criteria one might expect under the original socio-technical transitions storyline: procedural lessons that inform the institutional reforms needed to support structural change; demand-side innovations in user practices; new business models and other social innovations (Kern and Smith 2008).”