Florian Kern

• PhD in Science and Technology Policy Studies
• Head of Department at Institute for Ecological Economy Research

Zur Förderung des Hochlaufs einer deutschen Wasserstoffwirtschaft gibt es seit 2020 eine nationale Wasserstoffstrategie. Sie wurde 2023 von der Ampelregierung überarbeitet. Setzt sie angemessene Leitlinien für die Entwicklung einer nachhaltigen Wasserstoffwirtschaft in Deutschland?

„Zeitenwende: Wird diesmal alles anders?“, so fragte das Institut für ökologische Wirtschaftsforschung (IÖW) 2020 mit Blick auf die Herausforderungen der Coronakrise auf seiner Jahrestagung. Heute muss festgestellt werden, dass der Begriff ubiquitär genutzt wird, dass aber die erforderlichen Transformationspfade nicht entwickelt werden.

Online user communities have given rise to a new form of peer network collaboration. This paper examines three user innovation communities to assess their contribution to sustainability transitions , particularly in terms of exploring sustainable technical solutions and their integration into society. We study three user innovation communities by a...

The need for faster and deeper transitions toward more sustainable development pathways is now widely recognized. How to meet that need has been at the center of a growing body of academic research and real-world policy implementation. This paper presents our perspective on some of the most powerful insights that have emerged from this ongoing work...

Technological change is often seen as part of the solution to problems of global sustainability. A wide-ranging literature on how path dependent—often fossil fuel-based—socio-technical configurations can be overcome by more sustainable configurations has emerged over the last two decades. One potential transition pathway to transform electricity, h...

Die Förderung der Wasserstoffwirtschaft kommt seit 2022 langsam in Schwung. Die Untersuchung des Policy-Mix zur Förderung der Wasserstoffwirtschaft wird ergänzt durch einen Blick auf die Politik in den konkurrierenden Transformationspfaden Elektromobilität und Wärmepumpen.

This report assesses the EU policy mix shaping Europe's food system in the light of research into the dynamics and governance of sustainability transitions. The report addresses two core questions. First, is the current EU policy mix governing Europe's food system consistent with the transformative objectives set out in the European Green Deal? Sec...

Online communities have given rise to a new mode of technology development, which we call peer innovation. Three peer innovation communities are assessed as to how they contribute to socio-technical change.The case studies are based on close examination of the online interactions in community forums and interviews with community members. We use the...

Knapper Wasserstoff muss zielgerichtet und sparsam eingesetzt werden, um Versorgungssicherheit, Wirtschaftlichkeit und Klimaschutz zu gewährleisten. Erste Ergebnisse aus dem Vorhaben „Wasserstoff als Allheilmittel?“ zeigen den Bedarf für eine Priorisierung von Wasserstoffanwendungen.

Energy efficiency policies leading to energy demand reductions are a crucial component of ambitious energy transition strategies. However, rebound effects have been suggested to reduce energy demand reductions from energy efficiency improvements. Such effects have been studied extensively in the literature, but there has been less focus on the ques...

Decades of techno-economic energy policymaking and research have meant evidence from the Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH)—including critical reflections on what changing a society’s relation to energy (efficiency) even means—have been underutilised. In particular, (i) the SSH have too often been sidelined and/or narrowly pigeonholed by policyma...

Die Veröffentlichung des Berichts „Grenzen des Wachstums“ im Jahre 1972 war ein globales mediales Ereignis und löste weitreichende Kontroversen aus. Viele der damaligen Fragen sind bis heute unbeantwortet. Der Artikel beleuchtet die historischen Kontexte und zieht Schlussfolgerungen für die Zukunft.

While the past decade of transitions scholarship has increasingly acknowledged the centrality of politics, key questions on transition politics deserve further research. Here, we develop a heuristic framework from the discipline of political science that separates transition politics into the classic categories of interests, ideas, institutions, as...

Transition scholars devote surprisingly little attention to the sustainability of digitalization. We call for more work on digitalization in transition studies. We offer a number of perspectives to study the roles of digitalization in sustainability transitions.

Literature on the rebound phenomenon has grown significantly over the last decade. However, the field is characterized by diverse and ambiguous definitions and by substantial discrepancies in empirical estimates and policy proposals. As a result, cumulative knowledge production is difficult. To address these issues, this article develops a novel ty...

Einführung in das Schwerpunktthema

The recently developed Deep Transitions framework has so far been mainly used to explore the first deep transition towards industrial modernity. This paper looks at a potential second deep transition towards a circular economy, which is hoped to lead to a more sustainable global economic system. Our focus is on exploring the role of the EU in devel...

Klima- und Biodiversitätskrisen erfordern tiefgreifende Transformationen von Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. Die Corona-Pandemie hat aufgezeigt, dass weitreichendes politisches und gesellschaftliches Handeln in Krisenzeiten möglich ist, aber eben auch, dass die Herausforderungen einer gestalteten Transformation nicht kleiner werden.

Understanding how policy and policy-making processes can influence the speed and direction of socio-technical change is an important, yet underexplored research agenda in the field of sustainability transitions. This paper is the first application of a novel analytical framework which conceptualises the co-evolutionary dynamics of policy mixes and...

Die Umweltpolitische Digitalagenda des Bundesumweltministeriums (BMU) bietet einen anspruchsvollen Einstieg in die politische Gestaltung der Digitalisierung aus der Perspektive einer sozial-ökologischen Transformation, aber greift noch zu kurz.

Globally, there are a wide variety of policies in place that could help contribute to deep greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions reductions in the light-duty vehicle sector. Most regions are impacted by a mix of such policies. However, the transportation literature has devoted little attention to policy mixes, especially in the light-duty vehicles sector,...

‘Sustainability transitions: policy and practice’ identifies policy options for responding to systemic environmental and climate problems in Europe and globally. Drawing on the the growing body of international research into sustainability transitions, as well as interactions with policymakers and EU institutions, the report sets out 10 sets of mes...

There has been an increasing interest in science, technology and innovation policy studies in the topic of policy mixes. While earlier studies conceptualised policy mixes mainly in terms of combinations of instruments to support innovation, more recent literature extends the focus to how policy mixes can foster sustainability transitions. For this,...

Research on sustainability transitions has expanded rapidly in the last ten years, diversified in terms of topics and geographical applications, and deepened with respect to theories and methods. This article provides an extensive review and an updated research agenda for the field, classified into nine main themes: understanding transitions; power...

This is the first output for a 3-year research project (ReCap), which is focusing on economy-wide rebound effects and how to mitigate them through policy action. This discussion paper has been written collectively by the research team and has two aims: One is to develop a systematic understanding of the various kinds of rebound effects that are dis...

The ways in which institutions are reconfigured to change mainstream selection pressures to favour sustainability is central to research on sustainability transitions but has only recently begun to receive more attention. Of this existing work, empirical attention has mainly focused on the national level with less attention to local dynamics. Atten...

Cities raise major challenges and opportunities for achieving sustainability. Much literature on urban sustainability focuses on specific aspects such as planning practices, urban policy or the diffusion of more sustainable technologies or practices. However, attempts at understanding the mechanisms of structural change towards sustainability have...

Understanding how policymaking processes can influence the rate and direction of socio-technical change towards sustainability is an important, yet underexplored research agenda in the field of sustainability transitions. Some studies have sought to explain how individual policy instruments can influence transitions, and the politics surrounding th...

City-regions as sites of sustainability transitions have remained under-explored so far. With our comparative analysis of five diverse European city-regions, we offer new insights on contemporary sustainability transitions at the urban level. In a similar vein, the pre-development and the take-off phase of sustainability transitions have been studi...

This paper provides a survey of policy process theories and their usefulness in transitions research. Some research has already used such theories, but often in an ad hoc and relatively cursory way and with little attention to potential alternatives. However, it has been argued that transition scholars need to pay more attention to the politics of...

Energy transitions face multiple barriers, lock-in, path dependencies and resistance to change which require strategic policy efforts to be overcome. In this regard, it has been increasingly recognised that a multiplicity of instruments – or instrument mixes – are needed to foster low-carbon transitions. In addition, over the past few years a broad...

To meet global climate goals an energy transition is needed. However, energy transitions are complex and long-term processes and require a variety of public policy interventions to steer their direction and speed to achieve global climate change mitigation targets. One area where policy support is required is energy efficiency, which offers a high...

Urban sustainability transitions have attracted increasing academic interest. However, the political-institutional contexts, in which these urban sustainability transitions unfold and by which they are incited, shaped, or inhibited, have received much less attention. This is why we aim at extending previous studies of sustainability transitions by...

The ambition of energy policy has long been to reduce carbon emissions, secure energy supply and provide affordable energy services. In recent years an increasing number of policy instruments have been introduced to promote energy efficiency in different sectors across the EU. While previous research has largely analysed the effectiveness of indivi...

The recent debate on the temporal dynamics of energy transitions is crucial since one of the main reasons for embarking on transitions away from fossil fuels is tackling climate change. Long-drawn out transitions, taking decades or even centuries as we have seen historically, are unlikely to help achieve climate change mitigation targets. Therefore...

This Handbook is the first volume to analyse the International Political Economy, the who-gets-what-when-and-how, of global energy. Divided into five sections, it features 28 contributions that deal with energy institutions, trade, transitions, conflict and justice. The chapters span a wide range of energy technologies and markets - including oil a...

Perhaps not since the 1970s has energy policy, technology, and security been so intensely discussed as today. Whether it is the race for energy resources in the Arctic, roller-coaster oil prices, the transition toward low carbon sources of energy, or concerns over nuclear safety, energy continues to make international headlines. Today’s pressing en...

This paper aims to make two contributions to the sustainability transitions literature, in particular the Geels and Schot (2007. Res. Policy 36(3), 399) transition pathways typology. First, it reformulates and differentiates the typology through the lens of endogenous enactment, identifying the main patterns for actors, formal institutions, and tec...

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 mixe...

Energy transitions are understood as structural long-term transformations of the way energy needs are met. The ongoing energy transition poses significant challenges for analysis and theory building. It is characterized by a high degree of uncertainty and complexity, a key role for public policy, strong vested interests and lock-in, simultaneous ch...

Energy systems around the globe face multiple, major pressures to transform into more sustainable ones. Over the past decades numerous, potentially sustainable energy innovations have been proposed, studied, developed and implemented to varying degrees. In the field of transition studies, scholars have used the notion of 'protective space' to study...

The contributors investigate policy paradigms and their ability to explain the policy process – actors, ideas, discourses and strategies employed – to provide readers with a better understanding of public policy and its dynamics. Drawing together leading researchers in the field, this edited collection offers a unique insight into a selection of po...

It is widely acknowledged that many renewable energy technologies cannot (yet) compete with incumbent (fossil fuel) options e.g. in terms of price. Transitions literature argues that sustainable innovations can nevertheless break out of their ‘niches’ if properly shielded, nurtured and empowered. Most studies using this perspective have focused on...

Questions whether the technological innovation systems approach can be used to study transitions. Politics is a much more pervasive feature of transitions than 'legitimation'. Weakness of systems approaches is that they pay insufficient attention to agency. TIS approach fails to take into account structural rigidities in existing sectors. However,...

In the sustainability transitions literature the idea of ‘protective space’ shielding niche innovations from unfriendly selection environments is a fundamental concept. Few studies pause to consider how and by whom such protective space is created, maintained or expanded. The paper develops three propositions to deepen our understanding of the ‘out...

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 mixe...

It has long been argued that materialist explanations (i.e. focusing exclusively on interests) of policy-making and institutional change are limited and that concepts developed within the ‘new’ institutionalism may provide some extra explanatory depth (Blyth, 2002; Fischer, 2003; Widmaier, Blyth, & Seabrooke, 2007). The ‘new’ institutionalism, form...

This paper contributes to the literature on institutional change by creating a framework that both measures and explains policy change. The framework is then applied to UK energy policy from 2000 to 2011 and finds that a policy paradigm change has occurred. Contrary to expectations in the literature, however, the process of change has been informed...

This special edition to be published in Applied Energy brings together a range of papers that explore the complex, multi-dimensional and inter-related issues associated with the supply or value chains that make up energy systems and how a focus on them can bring new insights for energy security in a low carbon transition. Dealing with the trilemma...

UK is world leader in offshore wind deployment. Article explains boom in deployment by looking at the politics of renewable energy policy. Offshore wind is supported by a variety of actors with aligned political and economic interests. Analysis highlights the importance of a system builder. a b s t r a c t Offshore wind technology has recently unde...

Offshore wind technology has recently undergone rapid deployment in the UK. And yet, up until recently, the UK was considered a laggard in terms of deploying renewable energy. How can this burst of offshore activity be explained? An economic analysis would seek signs for newfound competitiveness for offshore wind in energy markets. A policy anal...

Carbon capture and storage (CCS) technologies are often highlighted as a crucial component of future low carbon energy systems in the UK and internationally. Whilst these technologies are now in the demonstration phase world-wide, they are still characterised by a range of technical, economic, policy, social and legal uncertainties. This paper appl...

Whilst carbon capture and storage (CCS) technologies are now in the demonstration phase, they are still characterised by a range of technical, economic, policy, social and legal uncertainties. This paper presents the results of an interdisciplinary research project funded by the UK Energy Research Centre (UKERC). The aim of the project was to analy...

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.

This paper engages with recent research concerning the roles of niche spaces in the strategic management of sustainable innovations. Whilst a growing body of empirical investigation looks to developments within these spaces, it is surprising how little pauses to consider how the spaces themselves develop over time, what constitutes these spaces, an...

A growing literature on socio-technical transitions argues that structural change in societal subsystems is necessary to move towards more sustainable societies. Proponents of policy approaches such as |transition management| have prescribed an important role to governments in such processes, but have so far paid too little attention to the politic...

Carbon capture and storage (CCS) is seen as a key technology to tackle climate change. The principal idea of CCS is to remove carbon from the flue gases arising from burning fuels for electricity generation or industrial applications and to store the carbon in geological formations to prevent it from entering the atmosphere. Policy makers in severa...

In recent years a growing literature on socio-technical transitions towards sustainability has emerged. Scholars have explored ways through which configurations of technologies, infrastructures, social practices, institutions and markets can change to fulfil their functions in a more sustainable way. A multi-level perspective (MLP) has been develop...

a b s t r a c t This paper reviews the developments of solar photovoltaic (PV) technology in The Netherlands. Despite the recent boom in PV industries and its global deployment, The Netherlands has up to now not experienced major growth in the diffusion of PV electricity generation. But this is only part of the story. This paper focuses on the ques...

This paper develops an interdisciplinary framework to assess the different dimensions of uncertainties which surround the development of carbon capture and storage (CCS). It includes technical, economic, financial, political and societal uncertainties about CCS and develops methods for assessing these uncertainties. It also identifies important lin...

Over the last few years a fast-growing literature has developed around the notion of sociotechnical transitions and the possibilities for governing 'system innovations' towards sustainability. Government policies are assumed to play an important role in such processes. However, an important critique has suggested not to see these transition process...

Proposals to alter large-scale socio-technical systems through government actions in order to promote goals such as sustainability are highly uncertain policy projects. What is being proposed is the replacement of specific elements of existing policy ‘mixes’—the goals and means—by others, in the expectation of avoiding counterproductive or sub-opti...

In 2001 the Dutch government adopted a new policy in its Fourth National Environmental Policy Plan. Its transitions approach seeks radically more sustainable socio-technical systems, and represents an attempt to reinvigorate ecological modernisation. To explain the rise of this distinct policy storyline, a coalition of researchers and policy-makers...

Around the world energy policy is becoming more politically heated. An interrelated set of factors explains this: new scientific findings about climate change and its likely consequences; rising energy prices; controversy about nuclear ambitions; fears about the security of fossil fuel supplies relating to short-term geopolitical instabilities; rap...

Over 20 years ago UN Commission on Environment and Development called on governments around the world to make sustainable development their first priority. The ‘Brundtland Report’ provided a definition still regularly quoted in policy documents committing governments to the aim. Sustainable development is: [D]evelopment that meets the needs of the...

Part I of Energy for the Future developed a critique of the way energy policymaking is conducted, drawing attention to issues such as problem framing, institutional inertia, civil legitimacy, technological ‘lock-in’ and over-reliance on competition as a mechanism to achieve energy policy goals. Part II focuses on ways to tackle the challenges so th...

Increasingly, researchers and policy makers are confronting the challenge of restructuring energy systems into more sustainable forms. A ‘transition management’ model, and its adoption in the Netherlands, is attracting attention. Starting from the socio-technical multi-level theory that informs ‘transition management’, we analyse the ‘energy transi...

The rise of a transitions discourse in Dutch environmental policy is analysed. This new approach to environmental policy seeks radically more sustainable socio- technical systems. As such, its agenda constitutes the latest twist in attempts at ecological modernisation, aiming to decouple economic growth from harmful environmental degradation. The c...

Throughout Europe policy-makers are increasingly confronting the challenge of restructuring energy systems into more sustainable forms. Innovation is often considered as a win-win-solution by helping to tackle climate change whilst also contributing to develop low carbon business opportunities. In the UK policy makers are trying to foster low carbo...

This paper argues that fostering low carbon innovation is key to achieving two EU policy goals simultaneously: reducing carbon emissions and being competitive. The UK has ambitious goals in reducing its carbon emissions by 60% in the long term and has set up the Carbon Trust as an independent, non-profit company, led by business but financed by the...

The rise of a transitions discourse in Dutch environmental policy is analysed. This new approach to environmental policy seeks radically more sustainable socio-technical systems. As such, its agenda constitutes the latest twist in attempts at ecological modernisation, aiming to decouple economic growth from harmful environmental degradation. The co...

The rise of a transitions discourse in Dutch environmental policy is analysed. This new approach to environmental policy seeks radically more sustainable socio-technical systems. As such, its agenda constitutes the latest twist in attempts at ecological modernisation, aiming to decouple economic growth from harmful environmental degradation. The co...