1st FEB: IFI Seminar Series on Sustainability Transitions

Sustainability transitions research has received increasing attention in recent years, both in academia and policy making. The long-standing unsustainable patterns of production and consumption in energy, mobility, and other socio-technical systems have brought us enormous social challenges and problems, such as climate change. Such challenges are difficult to be dealt with through incremental innovation or innovation in respective technology. Instead, radical innovation involving fundamental transformation in the socio-technical systems—sustainability transitions, i.e. shifts to new socio-technical systems—and to understand how to govern and guide such a process is urgently needed.
Japan is confronting the challenges of moving toward carbon neutrality by 2050 and accelerating such a sustainable energy transition. In this online seminar series, we thus invite researchers from Europe which has led the sustainability transitions research, to share their insights in energy transition and to exchange ideas.

Dr. Jakob Wachsmuth,
Competence Center Energy Policy and Energy Markets, Fraunhofer Institute for Systems and Innovation Research ISI

“Extending model-based transformation pathways to socio-technical scenarios via co-creation of transformative policy mixes”

There is a long-standing debate on the usefulness of model-based transformation path-ways for informing policy makers in the context of sustainability transitions. The main reasons are that the models usually do not address certain socio-technical aspects and that the tacit knowledge of stakeholders is not taken into account. One proposed solution is the co-creation of transformative policy mixes with stakeholders, extending the model-based pathways to socio-technical scenarios with qualitative assessments of the transformation pathways. The objective of co-creating transformative policy mixes is the mutual learning of scientists and key stakeholders about how a desired transformation could be realized and which context factors need to be taken into account. In particular, the identification of central bottlenecks can raise awareness of the challenges to be tack-led within future policy processes and be integrated in future modeling exercises.

In this talk, we explain the conceptual background for co-creating transformative policy mixes with key stakeholders as one option to extend the model-based pathways. In particular, we introduce the basic concept of a policy mix and elaborate on the dimensions of a transformative policy mix. Furthermore, we describe a typology of bottlenecks by referring to common stakeholder concerns and consider how to map the relevant stakeholder groups. Finally, we take a look at first European case studies related to achieving greenhouse gas neutrality, which are currently in preparation.

Secretariat, Institute for Future Initiatives, The University of Tokyo
e-mail: ifi_tg★ifi.u-tokyo.ac.jp (Please replace ★ with @.)