Using the multi-level perspective on socio-technical transitions to assess innovation policy
By F. Kern. 2012
149 citations recorded by the source corpus.
In recent years a growing literature on socio-technical transitions towards sustainability has emerged. Scholars have explored ways through which configurations of technologies, infrastructures, social practices, institutions and markets can change to fulfil their functions in a more sustainable way. A multi-level perspective (MLP) has been developed to describe and analyse these complex, long-term processes. It has also been used to help design policy for example in the Netherlands. In this paper the MLP is used in a novel way: as a heuristic to ex ante assess policies to stimulate socio-technical transitions. Instead of using it for policy development, the MLP is used here for an assessment of policy. The analysis focuses on a particular policy initiative intended to stimulate the transition to a low carbon economy in the UK: the Carbon Trust. This paper makes two contributions to the socio-technical transitions literature: Conceptually, the paper demonstrates the usefulness of the socio-technical multi-level perspective to analyse policies and assess their likely impact ex ante against the background of theorising about the patterns of large scale, socio-technical change. Empirically, the paper finds that the activities of the Carbon Trust consist of a variety of well targeted ways to stimulate the development of socio-technical niches as well as to change regime practices directly. Nevertheless, the paper argues that this model also faces difficulties in promoting a transition towards a low carbon economy.
Subfields: Global and Planetary Change, Management of Technology and Innovation, Sociology and Political Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b2c954ec02aa0534d5eb69fa22248048bf9f2b23
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In Global and Planetary Change
In Management of Technology and Innovation
In Sociology and Political Science
Citations in the corpus
- Transition heuristic frameworks in research on agro-food sustainability transitions (2020, background): “1998; Smith 2007; Raven and Geels 2010), transition managementent (Loorbach 2010; Kern 2012) and technological innovation systems (Bergek et al.”