Creative destruction or mere niche creation? Innovation policy mixes for sustainability transitions

Recently, there has been an increasing interest in policy mixes in innovation studies. While it has long been acknowledged that the stimulation of innovation and technological change involves different types of policy instruments, how such instruments form policy mixes has only recently become of interest. We argue that an area in which policy mixes are particularly important is the field of sustainability transitions. Transitions imply not only the development of disruptive innovations but also of policies aiming for wider change in socio-technical systems. We propose that ideally policy mixes for transitions include elements of ‘creative destruction’, involving both policies aiming for the ‘creation’ of new and for ‘destabilising’ the old. We develop a novel analytical framework including the two policy mix dimensions (‘creation’ and ‘destruction’) by broadening the technological innovation system functions approach, and specifically by expanding the concept of ‘motors of innovation’ to ‘motors of creative destruction’. We test this framework by analysing ‘low energy’ policy mixes in Finland and the UK. We find that both countries have diverse policy mixes to support energy efficiency and reduce energy demand with instruments to cover all functions on the creation side. Despite the demonstrated need for such policies, unsurprisingly, destabilising functions are addressed by fewer policies, but there are empirical examples of such policies in both countries. The concept of ‘motors of creative destruction’ is introduced to expand innovation and technology policy debates to go beyond policy mixes consisting of technology push and demand pull instruments, and to consider a wider range of policy instruments combined in a suitable mix which may contribute to sustainability transitions

The transitions discourse in the ecological modernisation of the Netherlands

Discourse analysis, socio-technical transitions, ecological modernisation

The politics of governing ‘system innovations’ towards sustainable electricity systems

Electricity production and consumption are at the heart of modern life and are therefore of great interest to public policy. Threats such as security of supply concerns, the volatility of fuel and electricity prices, and especially environmental concerns like climate change, are putting increasing pressure on current electricity systems. One key response by governments has been support for innovation. It is widely acknowledged that electricity systems will have to change fundamentally in order to deliver on political goals. This will require deep cuts in greenhouse gas emissions. Incremental change along established technological trajectories is unlikely to be sufficient. Instead ‘system innovations’ have been suggested as a solution by scholars and policy makers. What are the politics of such an endeavour? To answer this question this thesis looks at two distinct policy initiatives to promote more sustainable electricity systems: the ‘Energy Transition’ project in the Netherlands and the ‘Carbon Trust’ in the UK. While the aim of the two policy initiatives is similar, they try to tackle the challenge in very different ways. The analysis is based on semi-structured interviews as well as a review of documents and secondary literature and follows a process tracing method, combining within-case and cross-case analysis. By utilising a framework based on ‘discursive institutionalism’ (as per Hajer and Schmidt) the study aims to shed light on the importance of both discourses and institutional contexts in shaping policy initiatives to promote ‘system innovations’. It demonstrates the mechanisms by which particular framings of the problem, expressed through new storylines, come to legitimate particular government policies. It emerges that existing institutions not only shape which storylines are politically acceptable but also constitute tangible features of the organisational and technical environment which those initiatives must change. In conclusion, the thesis argues that the politics of governing ‘system innovations’ can usefully be conceptualised and explained by struggles about meaning. These are shaped in turn through discursive interactions between actors as well as existing institutions. By highlighting the interplay between discourses, interests and institutions, the results provide an input to scholarly debate and policy making alike, in ways that offer to help inform the rethinking of strategies for fostering socio-technical ‘system innovations’

Response to the DECC Consultation of the siting process for a Geological Disposal Facility, 2013

Several members of SEG (Matt Gross, Phil Johnstone, Florian Kern, Gordon MacKerron, and Andy Stirling) have participated in a written response to the Department of Energy and Climate Change’s (DECC) consultation of the siting process for a Geological Disposal Facility (GDF) for nuclear waste. This consultation follows the rejection by Cumbria County Council earlier this year to hosting a Geological Disposal Facility. The government have therefore gone back to the national level to find a suitable location, and the issue remains a multifaceted and controversial one. Matt Gross and Phil Johnstone also represented SEG at the one day consultation on the same issue run by DECC at Centre Hall, Westminster, involving several round-table discussions with civil service, nuclear regulators, and local politicians on the various issues surrounding the siting of a GDF

Traditional Institutions and Social Cooperation: Experimental Evidence from the Buganda Kingdom

Recent studies show that traditional institutions and their representatives – such as chiefs or elders – are influential political forces in Sub-Saharan Africa and elsewhere. In this paper, we further explore the causal mechanism through which traditional institutions increase cooperation and mobilization. We employ a lab-in-the-field experiment using modified public goods games involving the Buganda Kingdom of Uganda. We incorporate references to traditional authority to measure whether participants contribute more when traditional institutions are involved. We explicate and test two possible mechanisms through which traditional institutions might affect cooperation and mobilization: a horizontal mechanism driven by peer-to-peer effects; and a vertical mechanism driven by access to social hierarchies. We find evidence for the latter. This suggests the critical role of traditional institutions in increasing cooperation because individuals expect that their cooperation and investment will be rewarded by traditional social elites

Does arterial ageing differ between Europeans and Japanese and Korean patient samples? Results from current UK studies

Objective: Vascular stiffness has long been linked with the ageing process. However, it is only since the development of accurate methods for measuring arterial compliance that unravelling this relationship has become possible. Arterial stiffening over time appears to differ between ethnic groups and/or geographic areas. We investigated how the cardio-ankle vascular index (CAVI) varied with chronological age to make initial comparisons of its change with age between this European study and published data from Japanese and Korean patient populations. Method: 312 participants (180 men, 132 women), age 63.7±12.9 (mean±SD), range 25-92 years. The following were measured: CAVI using VaSera VS-1500N® (Fukuda Denshi, Japan); brachial BP using OMRON705-IT; baseline characteristics and physical examination of cardiovascular health. These data are from current UK studies of healthy volunteers with approximately 20% having two or more cardiovascular risk factors. Results: CAVI was significantly correlated with age (r=0.63, p<0.001), more closely in men (r=0.71, p<0.001) than women (r=0.54, p<0.001). These data were used to create a preliminary set of ‘usual’ average CAVI values for each age category (Table) and compared against data from Japan[1] and Korea[2] (plot 1 & 2). Korean men had lower CAVI values at each age. Conclusions: This suggests CAVI is closely related to ageing and may be a useful indicator of vascular age. In initial comparisons, the slope of arterial ‘ageing’ may be steeper for Europeans, especially men over 60 years, than for Japanese and particularly Koreans, but detailed analysis has not yet been done due to lack of raw data

Explaining the Constitutional Integration and Resurgence of Traditional Political Institutions in Sub-Saharan Africa

Social scientists have recently observed a “resurgence” of traditional political institutions on the constitutional level in Sub-Sahara Africa. Yet, the scope and causes of the resurgence remain unclear. We base our analysis on original data on the degree of constitutional integration of traditional institutions and on their constitutional resurgence since 1990 in 45 countries of Sub-Saharan Africa. We test six theoretical explanations for constitutionalization: former colonial rule, democratization, state capacity, economic development, foreign aid and settlement patterns. First, we verify the broad resurgence of traditional political institutions on a constitutional level. Second, our analysis suggests that, particularly in former British colonies, traditional leaders were able to translate the arrangements of British colonial rule as well as the advantages of a country’s deconcentrated settlement pattern into greater constitutional status. Third, settlement patterns proved important for traditional leaders to gain or increase constitutional status – leading to a constitutional resurgence of traditional institutions

Everything, Everywhere All in One Evaluation: Using Multiverse Analysis to Evaluate the Influence of Model Design Decisions on Algorithmic Fairness

A vast number of systems across the world use algorithmic decision making (ADM) to (partially) automate decisions that have previously been made by humans. When designed well, these systems promise more objective decisions while saving large amounts of resources and freeing up human time. However, when ADM systems are not designed well, they can lead to unfair decisions which discriminate against societal groups. The downstream effects of ADMs critically depend on the decisions made during the systems' design and implementation, as biases in data can be mitigated or reinforced along the modeling pipeline. Many of these design decisions are made implicitly, without knowing exactly how they will influence the final system. It is therefore important to make explicit the decisions made during the design of ADM systems and understand how these decisions affect the fairness of the resulting system. To study this issue, we draw on insights from the field of psychology and introduce the method of multiverse analysis for algorithmic fairness. In our proposed method, we turn implicit design decisions into explicit ones and demonstrate their fairness implications. By combining decisions, we create a grid of all possible "universes" of decision combinations. For each of these universes, we compute metrics of fairness and performance. Using the resulting dataset, one can see how and which decisions impact fairness. We demonstrate how multiverse analyses can be used to better understand variability and robustness of algorithmic fairness using an exemplary case study of predicting public health coverage of vulnerable populations for potential interventions. Our results illustrate how decisions during the design of a machine learning system can have surprising effects on its fairness and how to detect these effects using multiverse analysis

Implementing the Green Economy

The economic crisis has given new impetus to discussions about green growth and the green economy. But how can the concept of a green economy be translated into concrete action? The field of energy production and consumption provides examples of deliberate transition management

A multiparameter Stochastic Sewing lemma and the regularity of local times associated to Gaussian sheets

We establish a multiparameter extension of the stochastic sewing lemma. This allows us to derive novel regularity estimates on the local time of locally non-deterministic Gaussian fields. These estimates are sufficiently strong to derive regularization by noise results for SDEs in the plain. In this context, we make the interesting and rather surprising observation that regularization effects profiting from each parameter of the underlying stochastic field in an additive fashion usually appear to be due to boundary terms of the driving stochastic field