Scientific research about climate change mitigation in transport: a critical review

By Tim Schwanen, David Banister, Jillian Anable. 2011

335 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper seeks to develop a deeper understanding of the research on climate change mitigation in transport. We suggest that work to date has focused on the effects of improvements in transport technologies, changes in the price of transport, physical infrastructure provision, behavioural change and alternative institutional arrangements for governing transport systems. In terms of research methodologies, positivist and quantitative analysis prevails, although there are signs of experimentation with non-positivist epistemologies and participatory methods. These particular engagements with climate change mitigation reflect mutually reinforcing tendencies within and beyond the academic transport community. We first draw on a revised version of Thomas Kuhn’s philosophy of science to explore the path dependencies within transport studies, which are at least partly responsible for the predisposition towards quantitative modelling and technology, pricing and infrastructure oriented interventions in transport systems. We then employ the governmentality perspective to examine how transport academics’ engagements with climate change mitigation depend on and align with more general understandings of climate change in UK society and beyond. The analysis makes clear that ecological modernisation and neo-liberal governmentality more generally provide the context for the current focus on and belief in technological, behaviour change, and especially market-based mitigation strategies. While current research trajectories are important and insightful, we believe that a deeper engagement with theoretical insights from the social sciences will produce richer understandings of transport mitigation in transport and briefly outline some of the contributions thinking on socio-technical transitions and practice theories can make.

Subfields: Global and Planetary Change, Transportation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e6b9dba82ea843170741cce01e37f596018183a8

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Citations in the corpus

Societal Transformations in Models for Energy and Climate Policy: The Ambitious Next Step (2019, background): “Popular tools for exploring pathways and short-term actions toward these targets include integrated assessmentmodels (IAMs) of climate change,(3) energy-system models,(4) and other sectorspecific models.(5,6) IAMs are computational models that represent long-term global and regional dynamics of inte”
Critical Issues in Air Transport and Tourism (2013, background): “…to consider social costs, although the counter argument could be levied that failure to recognise environmental implications of unmanaged emissions from aviation could have unknown future environmental and social impacts as the quantitative costings of damage becomes clear (Schwanen et al. 2011).”
A Review of Ex-Post Evidence for Mode Substitution and Induced Demand Following the Introduction of High-Speed Rail (2013, neutral): “Segal (2006) only makes reference to Thalys and Eurostar and it is not clear if their entire network is covered but this is the assumption.”
Exploring consumer preferences towards electric vehicles: The influence of consumer innovativeness (2016, background): “These issues corresponded with generally low expectations of the potential market for EVs (Train, 1980) which have been validated by low sales figures.”
Who buys New Energy Vehicles in China? Assessing social-psychological predictors of purchasing awareness, intention, and policy (2018, background): “There has been a growing interest concerning the relationship between climate change and transportation in China (Schwanen et al., 2011).”