Project description
Accelerating sustainable energy-mobility transitions
The 2015 Paris Agreement requires a rapid decarbonisation of our production and consumption systems and a transition to low-carbon solutions. The EU-funded EMPOCI project will investigate how the global low-carbon transition in the increasingly interconnected energy and mobility systems can be accelerated on a regional and national level. It will employ a multi-method research design combining qualitative and quantitative methods to investigate the interplay between policy mixes, transformative capacity and low-carbon innovations in four frontrunner regions in Germany, the UK, the USA and China. The project will create innovative methodological instruments to gain a deep understanding of the drivers and obstacles facing the multi-sectoral transition processes towards sustainability. It will also co-design practically relevant strategies for accelerating sustainable energy-mobility transitions.
Objective
In its recent 1.5°C report the IPCC stressed that global efforts to promote low-carbon transitions need to be accelerated to meet the Paris Agreement. This raises a number of questions for the emerging field of policy mixes for sustainability transitions, such as on the role of actors and multi-level governance in politically contested socio-technical transition processes. In this project, I aim to address these knowledge gaps by asking how low-carbon transitions in the increasingly interconnected energy and mobility systems as major contributors to greenhouse gas emissions can be accelerated. EMPOCI has three objectives:
Objective 1: To provide a novel conceptual and empirical understanding of the global interplay between multi-level policy mixes and low-carbon innovations in socio-technical transitions which foregrounds the role of actors and transformative capacity.
-> By bridging the innovation and policy studies literatures and comparatively analyzing the increasingly interconnected electricity-mobility-ICT systems in four key countries, EMPOCI will advance the research frontier on transformative policy mixes for low-carbon transitions.
Objective 2: To develop and test widely applicable novel methodological tools enabling both deep and broad insights into the drivers and barriers in unfolding multi-sectoral transition processes towards sustainability.
-> Drawing on a multi-method research design EMPOCI will provide novel standards for assessing policy, agency and innovation dynamics in politically contested low-carbon transition processes (e.g. survey, big data).
Objective 3: To co-design practically relevant multi-actor strategies for accelerating sustainable energy-mobility transitions, thereby supporting the Paris Agreement in combating climate change.
-> Based on EMPOCI's findings a transformative foresight process is organized with stakeholders from business, policy, academia and society to jointly derive implications for transformative policy mixes.
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Funding Scheme
ERC-STG - Starting GrantHost institution
BN1 9RH Brighton
United Kingdom