Global Transitions最新文献

How can we enable equitable decarbonisation? There is a wide gap between power to make transformative decisions, on the one hand, and agency on the part of those affected by climate change, on the other. We converge scholarly strands to understand and address the causes for insufficient action towards equitable decarbonisation – the crisis of accountability – despite global recognition of the urgent need for such action. Just as we study the socio-materiality of energy systems to understand the ephemeral flows of energy, we must also unpick the making of socio-political arrangements to comprehend what practices determine the elusive governance of energy transitions. To unite the twin concerns of energy and accountability, we probe the relationship between accountability and legitimacy on the one hand, and the governance of sustainable energy transitions on the other. This synthesis offers three key insights. First, accountability and legitimacy are deeply conflictual issues where various actors negotiate and struggle for control in energy transitions. Second, the negotiations around accountability and legitimacy have outcomes that are often inequitable. Third, it is crucial that reforms and policies that aim to stimulate sustainable energy transitions address power imbalances as well as carbon emissions. Overall, building equity into processes of systemic change requires instituting strong mechanisms that generate public benefits while legitimating new socio-material infrastructure and practices.

The European Union (EU) has increasingly promoted “Responsible Innovation” (RI) policies in order to better harmonize technological progress with societal interest. RI has also triggered the attention of China, where it is included in the 13th Five-Year National Science and Technology Innovation Program (2016). However, each actor approaches RI in a different way. These differences could arguably be explained by three contextual factors: core values, goals of innovation and institutionalization logic. Taking into account the complex and global character of innovation-related challenges such as climate change, socio-cultural heterogeneity needs to be given serious consideration in order to achieve more effective RI dynamics in terms of anticipation, constituting common visions and goals and developing more coordinated international governance.

Energy poverty, a condition whereby people cannot secure adequate home energy services, is gaining prominence in public discourse and on political and policy agendas. As its measurement is operationalised, metrical developments are being socially shaped. A European Union mandate for biennial reporting on energy poverty presents an opportunity to institutionalise new metrics and thus privilege certain measurements as standards. While combining indicators at multiple scales is desirable to measure multi-dimensional aspects, it entails challenges such as database availability, coverage and limited disaggregated resolution. This article converges scholarship on metrics – which problematises the act of measurement – and on energy poverty – which apprehends socio-political and techno-economic particulars. Scholarship on metrics suggests that any basket of indicators risks silencing significant but hard to measure aspects, or unwarrantedly privileging others. State-of-the-art energy poverty scholarship calls for indicators that represent contextualised energy use issues, including energy access and quality, expenditure in relation to income, built environment related aspects and thermal comfort levels, while retaining simplicity and comparability for policy traction. We frame energy poverty metrology as the socially shaped measurement of a varied, multi-dimensional phenomenon within historically bureaucratic and publicly distant energy sectors, and assess the risks and opportunities that must be negotiated. To generate actionable knowledge, we propose an analytical framework with five dimensions of energy poverty metrology, and illustrate it using multi-scalar cases from three European countries. Dimensions include historical trajectories, data flattening, contextualised identification, new representation and policy uptake. We argue that the measurement of energy poverty must be informed by the politics of data and scale in order to institutionalise emerging metrics, while safeguarding against their co-optation for purposes other than the deep and rapid alleviation of energy poverty. This ‘dimensioned’ understanding of metrology can provide leverage to push for decisive action to address the structural underpinnings of domestic energy deprivation.

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused a worldwide disruption. Most people have never witnessed such a global threat, and the world’s leaders have not dealt with a crisis of this magnitude; moreover, Research & Innovation (R&I) teams have little time to invent new pharmaceutical therapies. Nations are trying to implement controlling strategies for avoiding significant losses, but this pandemic has already imprinted itself upon their citizens’ psyche, created social anxiety, and disrupted national economies. The complexity of the psychological, social, and economic interrelations of this new source of stress cannot be appropriately understood by scientific reductionism and specialised thinking only. It needs to be considered how the current pandemic links to questions of ecological sustainability and resilience. Further, we must rethink the complex interactions of human-nature health that drove the crisis, as proof of an unsustainable human civilisation. Accordingly, this paper aims to contribute to the transdisciplinary resilience dialogue on the health maintenance and life-supporting processes of the biosphere by focusing on the COVID-19 crisis. It explores various frameworks that are contributing to the transdisciplinary meta-perspective of resilience. Moreover, it proposes a humanistic approach based on not only controlling strategies involving containment and social isolation but also the ecological balance considering the human, societal, and ecological health as a system-wide emergent property. Conceptual frameworks of resilience are discussed—as mapping methodologies to structure the discourse—focusing on the role of leadership and empowerment. Furthermore, some positive insights are discussed, as a transdisciplinary integrator and solidarity facilitator of coping, mitigation, and decision-making in the time of uncertainty and anxiety created by the COVID-19 pandemic.

The United Kingdom has been a slow adopter of energy efficiency measures in domestic buildings. Ambitions to ensure that new homes are built to ‘zero carbon’ standards have been expressed by policy makers but subsequent targets have been abandoned. In the UK housing sector, the high costs of land, the stagnating delivery of affordable new-built homes, and market dominance by a handful of high-volume housebuilders limit progress towards lower carbon newbuild homes. Against this backdrop, the paper seeks to examine the emergence of a supposedly ‘alternative’ sub-sector. Inspired by pioneering initiatives in countries like Germany and the Netherlands, a handful of self-build projects have emerged in the UK. Through the analysis of two in depth case studies, Bath street in Edinburgh and Graven Hill in Oxfordshire, we find that self-build projects can not only deliver more diverse and bespoke homes, but also more energy efficiency. Our analysis therefore unpicks their success stories vis-à-vis the inefficiencies of speculative house building where the adoption of national policies on zero carbon homes has been resisted. Framing the emergence of these self-build projects in the UK as social innovation, we identify the physical, conceptual and affective spaces for system change that are opened up by our case studies. We subsequently reflect on the key roles played by intermediaries, including local authorities, in the potential facilitation and mainstreaming of self-build approaches to delivering more energy efficient homes.

Emerging decentralised electricity systems require new approaches to energy governance. As energy sources shift and technology evolves, electricity governance is shifting from largely centralized models to include multiple decentralised and multi-level sites not bounded in their operations by established democratic processes. New forms of accountability are required to ensure that multi-level electricity systems meet societal needs and expectations. While multi-level governance dynamics are new for many electricity systems, they are common across other resources (e.g. water). This article uses an OECD framework that synthesizes decades of research on multi-level natural resource governance to describe 12 principles for “good” resource governance. These principles are developed and applied to decentralising electricity governance contexts in order to develop mechanisms, and identify potential governance gaps, that are relevant for ensuring accountability in decentralised electricity governance systems. The nature of decentralised electricity systems particularly highlights the need to rescale many governance functions, while paying attention to issues of inclusion, capacity building, coherence, adaptiveness, and transparency.

The global risks report of 2020 stated, climate-related issues dominate all of the top-five long-term critical global risks burning the planet and according to the report, “as existing health risks resurge and new ones emerge, humanity’s past successes in overcoming health challenges are no guarantee of future results.” Over the last few decades, the world has experienced several pandemic outbreaks of various pathogens and the frequency of the emergence of novel strains of infectious organisms has increased in recent decades. As per expert opinion, rapidly mutating viruses, emergence and re-emergence of epidemics with increasing frequencies, climate-sensitive vector-borne diseases are likely to be increasing over the years and the trends will continue and intensify. Susceptible disease hosts, anthropogenic activities and environmental changes contribute and trigger the ‘adaptive evolution’ of infectious agents to thrive and spread into different ecological niches and to adapt to new hosts. The overarching objective of this paper is to provide insight into the human actions which should be strictly regulated to help to sustain life on earth. To identify and categorize the triggering factors that contribute to disease ecology, especially repeated emergence of disease pandemics, a theory building approach, ‘Total Interpretive Structural Modeling’ (TISM) was used; also the tool, ‘Impact Matrix Cross-Reference Multiplication Applied to a Classification’ analysis (MICMAC) was applied to rank the risk factors based on their impacts on other factors and on the interdependence among them. This mathematical modeling tool clearly explains the strength, position and interconnectedness of each anthropogenic factor that contributes to the evolution of pathogens and to the frequent emergence of pandemics which needs to be addressed with immediate priority. As we are least prepared for another pandemic outbreak, significant policy attention must be focused on the causative factors to limit emerging outbreaks like COVID 19 in the future.

Local energy transitions are gaining widespread attention through their contribution to sustainability, notably to climate change mitigation. Social innovation (SI) in local energy transitions have been scrutinized in multiple works, but the impact of SI on the local energy transitions is an under-studied field. The objective of this study is to put forward a method to model SI in local energy transitions. This is done using System Dynamics modelling (SDM) of the local energy transitions processes. The SDM method is to study a broad spectrum of socio-techno-natural phenomena, generally. In this study, SDM is used to capture the endogenous factors which underpin the transition processes. This study is based on two cases: solar photovoltaics (PV) diffusion in Skåne, and transition to alternative fuel vehicles (AFV) in Dalsland, Sweden. The transitions are modelled with the municipality actors providing input. Two simulation runs of the local transitions are executed, namely the Base run and No SI run. The Base run has the municipality actors’ co-creation actions. Results show that the co-creation actions induce a significant increase in the diffusion of electric vehicles in Dalsland and higher diffusion of solar PV in Skåne. The main outcome of this study is a model to assess the possible impacts of SI on local energy transitions. Ultimately, we hope to contribute to methods of quantitatively assessing the impact of SI in local energy transitions.

While national governments are the main actors in innovation policy, we witness a proliferation of challenge-oriented innovation policies both at the subnational and the supranational level. This begs the question about subsidiarity: what innovation policies for societal challenges should be organized at subnational, national and supranational levels? We provide arguments that innovation policies aimed to solve societal challenges, such as climate change or aging, are best pursued at subnational levels given the contested nature of problem identification and the contextual nature of problem-solving. Regional innovation policy, then, should formulate concrete societal goals tailored to the local context, while the transnational context promotes inter-regional learning and provides the complementary policies in the realms of basic research, regulation and taxation. In addition, the supranational level can set overall goals that are made more concrete and operational at the subnational level.