The need for policy coherence to trigger a transition to biogas production

By Suvi Huttunen, Paula Kivimaa, Venla Virkamäki. 2014

116 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Transitions towards more sustainable societies involve policy changes cutting across multiple sectors. Ideally, policies targeting different sectors create a coherent push for the adoption of more sustainable solutions. Sustainability transition studies have, however, paid little attention to the role of policy interaction across different policy domains. By focusing on biogas production in Finland and by further developing the technological innovation systems functions in connection to policy coherence, this paper examines how policy coherence is related to triggering transition from the perspective of biogas actors. The results demonstrate how supportive policies in one sector are made inefficient by unsupportive policies, instruments and practices in others. However, the lack of policy coherence, especially at the local level, may also have innovation-triggering influence when it forces actors to consider unconventional solutions. Thus the innovation effects of policy coherence are difficult to foresee and require an actor-focused perspective for analysis.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8561f239411528438603dc493d417d1868e44436

How researchers see this paper

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

In Economics and Econometrics

In Global and Planetary Change

In Sociology and Political Science

Citations in the corpus

Policy mixes for sustainability transitions: An extended concept and framework for analysis (2016, background): “Analyzing policy mixes across policy fields matters because internal and external inconsistencies and incoherencies within and across policy fields could render these mixes ineffective (Huttunen et al., 2014).”
Recent updates on biogas production - a review (2016, background): “The main political driving forces linked to the biogas system has a countryspecific variation ( Huttunen et al., 2014).”
Conceptualising multi-regime interactions: The role of the agriculture sector in renewable energy transitions (2015, background): “Equally, other regimes could be included in the analysis: Huttunen et al. (2014) argue that biogas represents a ‘cross-boundary innovation’, between energy production, waste management, agriculture and transport regimes.”