Beyond automobility? Lock-in of past failures in low-carbon urban mobility innovations.

Automobility, including the infrastructures, technologies and institutions that created high dependence on private car use, has led to significant environmental and climate problems and notably high carbon emissions. Now cities are attempting to move beyond this failed regime by experimenting with a range of different new mobility innovations. In this paper, we examine whether emergent policy-led experiments and innovation processes in low-carbon mobility are learning from the past, or whether they are reproducing key elements of past policy failures. Through four case studies – Birmingham, Stavanger, Milton Keynes and Melbourne – we assess attempts to break out of high-carbon automobility through three key factors, namely diversification of travel options, a shift from individual to shared forms of mobility, and whether these aspects are implemented at scale. We find that while all cities show potential for diversification and sharing at scale, current modes of innovation exhibit features that may reproduce rather than reduce high-carbon automobility. Our analysis attributes this risk of continued failure to how policy-led experimentation and innovation are structured and themselves become locked in, thereby upholding the obdurate automobility regime

Making the Most of Qualitative Evidence for Energy Poverty Mitigation:A Research Agenda and Call for Action

The field of energy poverty brings together a wide range of researchers, from numerous disciplines and using a range of methods. Qualitative research on energy poverty, especially on the lived experience of energy poor households, has burgeoned in recent years. Contributions stem from researchers based in a range of disciplines and nations, and studying varied contexts and spatial patterns of energy poverty (Bouzarovski and Tirado Herrero 2017; Aklin et al. 2018). This growing interest in qualitative evidence on energy poverty has given new insights into the complex, multi-dimensional and dynamic nature of this problem. It has helped contextualise existing quantitative data, by showing how policy plays out in peoples’ lives, and revealing what is working or not in these households’ everyday basis.The strengths of qualitative research are numerous, but principally, it allow us to grasp the systemic nature of this problem and engage in people centred research. As qualitative researchers we use terms like multi-dimensional, multi-scalar, dynamic and relational to describe the phenomenon of energy poverty. Moreover, while quantitative understandings represent people as numbers, percentages or proportions, qualitative work studies the daily lives of people. In short, qualitative research centres energy-poor and practitioner experiences as the main focus of analysis. As a result, it can play an emancipatory role in representing the interests of people experiencing specific problems. Hidden dimensions of energy poverty that are washed away in quantitative data aggregates can be revealed through qualitative research. This contributes to more appropriate and tailored policy interventions that better reflect the needs of energy poor households.This policy brief offers a research agenda and call for action to ‘make the most’ of qualitative evidence relating to energy poverty, based on discussions from an ENGAGER workshop in Amsterdam (30-31 October 2019) involving 50 researchers, policy-makers and practitioners from across the Netherlands and the ENGAGER network