Adrian Rinscheid

A timely transition of socio-technical systems to more sustainable alternatives is crucial in mitigating climate change and other environmental problems. While innovation plays a significant role in such transitions, policy makers and the scientific community have become increasingly aware that the deliberate destabilization of existing socio-technical regimes—including associated institutions and technologies—is also often necessary. However, such aspiration is politically contested. This paper presents the Endowment-Practice-Institutions (EPI) Framework to study the contestation of institutions underpinning socio-technical regimes. By integrating key theories from Institutional Sociology and Political Economy, the framework conceives actors’ capability of influencing institutional structures to be dependent on their institutional work practices and the various endowments that enable these practices. We present Japanese coal policy as an example to illustrate how the framework can be used to assess actors’ institutional work and their influence on institutional outcomes. In addition to providing new theoretical insights, the framework helps to systematically analyze agency-driven mechanisms pertinent for the maintenance or destabilization of socio-technical regimes.

Although many people are concerned about climate change, active public support for ambitious policies is still lagging behind. How can this gap be closed? Recent work has theorized that the perceived urgency of climate change drives public support for climate policy, but this lacks empirical evidence. Using advanced sparse regressions and comparative survey-embedded framing experiments with 9,911 eligible voters in Germany and the United States, we empirically studied the role of perceived urgency. Our study provides two findings. First, although perceived urgency is key in driving support for “low-cost” mitigation policies, it does not lead to more support for “high-cost” mitigation policies where the behavioral implications are visible. Second, while temporal reframing does not increase policy support or feelings of dread, context information about demand-side mitigation increases support for such costly climate policies. The results are particularly relevant for democracies, where ambitious policies require the support of citizens.

Discourse analysis is gaining attention in transition studies. This paper uses discourse network analysis (DNA) to study how discourse coalitions, and the storylines they mobilize, change over time. Drawing from archival data of two daily newspapers, we analyze the struggle over coal phase-out in Germany (2000–2020). We identify an anti-coal discourse coalition, which was stable and ideationally congruent over time. It used climate change as the dominant storyline to delegitimize coal. The phase-out policy decision in 2020 can be interpreted as the success of this coalition. The pro-coal coalition, in contrast, was more dispersed and less consistent in their arguments. Nonetheless, it was able to institutionalize some of its key storylines in the final policies. We argue that DNA is a powerful tool we can mobilize in sustainability transitions research for the study of politics and beyond.

Although Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) technologies can potentially play an important role in climate change mitigation efforts, commercial CCS projects are still rare. Knowledge about the technical challenges of these technologies is rapidly advancing, but the challenges related to their public acceptance are still underinvestigated. Here we try to close this research gap by investigating public perceptions of CCS and public attitudes towards policies to scale up these technologies in the United States, where most existing industrial-scale CCS projects are operating. Based on a demographically representative sample of US residents, we find that awareness of CCS is very low. Using a conjoint experiment, we show that policies that outlaw the construction of new coal- and gas-fired power plants without CCS find higher public support than CCS subsidies and increases in taxes on unabated fossil fuel power generation. Public support decreases with rising costs of CCS deployment and decreasing minimal distance requirements of CCS plants from residential areas. Our results provide insights into the political feasibility of a large-scale deployment of CCS and show that specific policy design choices play an important role in influencing public support for policies to scale up these technologies.

Phase-out is rapidly gaining traction as a central part of practical efforts to address sustainability challenges. However, the way it has been conceived of in policy debates and some academic work is problematic in that it (1) tends to be narrowly focused on substitution; (2) underexposes the bi-directional relationship between phase-outs and innovation; and (3) pays insufficient attention to political challenges. To fully reap the potential of phase-out in sustainability transitions, we call for a more integrative body of scholarship. We identify three important avenues to advance this agenda: First, shifting the unit of analysis to socio-technical systems and the reconfiguration of entire regimes will help to elucidate the multiple logics underlying phase-outs. Second, deepening insights on the timing and interaction between phase-out and innovation will unveil the potential of phase-outs in accelerating transitions. Finally, engaging with issues of power, political legitimacy, and equity is required to mitigate political challenges.

This study concentrates on the Clean Energy Ministerial (CEM) as one of several high-level global forums on climate change governance. The CEM can be conceptualised as a ‘polycentric’ organisation in which its members collaborate on a wide range of issues concerning the clean energy transition. Can we identify a set of domestic-level variables that explain the member states’ participation across different CEM initiatives? And can we identify clusters of CEM initiatives for which the same set of domestic-level variables provide robust explanations? Theoretically, we concentrate on domestic factors and how these explain engagement patterns in high-level global forums. Our findings for 12 initiatives show that there is no single domestic factor that explains engagement levels equally well for all CEM initiatives. Our overarching finding is that the domestic determinants of engagement vary across the initiatives, suggesting that future research should attend more closely to their specific features.

This study links voter-centred and interest group perspectives to assess the role structurally powerful businesses can play in contested political issues. Revisiting the literature on business influence in politics, incumbent businesses are theorised to strategically use their structural power to influence voters’ preferences. The conceptual framework is illustrated with a case study of a direct democratic vote related to Swiss energy policy. To empirically trace the role incumbent businesses played in the run-up to the vote, the study employs a two-step approach. First, it uses discourse network analysis (DNA) to examine arguments and actor coalitions in the public debate preceding the vote. Second, the DNA results inform a statistical analysis of survey data on voting behaviour. The findings suggest that incumbent businesses can use their structural power strategically to shape voting behaviour. The study stimulates the discussion about political power relationships in societies and enriches the nascent debate about phasing out unsustainable energy infrastructure. Importantly, it opens up ways to combine DNA with other methods, an avenue that shows promise for use and further refinement in future applications.