Transition pathways for a UK low carbon energy system: exploring different governance patterns

This paper describes outline transition pathways for a low carbon energy system in the UK, which are currently being developed in a collaborative research project, involving leading UK engineers, social scientists and policy analysts. The pathways are exploring different governance patterns, relating to the roles of central government, market actors and structures, and civil society, in relation to both centralised and decentralised systems for meeting energy service demands. This work is using a conceptual and analytical framework for specifying transition pathways that relates the multi-level perspective of landscape, regime and niche levels to recent work on technological innovation systems. The specification of the pathways draws on earlier work on UK energy and international energy scenarios, initial interviews with ‘gatekeepers’ from the UK energy policy and industry communities, and useful insights from a workshop with invited stakeholders from the policy-making, industry and academic communities, held in November 2008. The pathways explore how social and political issues, such as public acceptability of different technologies and institutional changes, the mixture of short-term and long-term drivers and influences affecting policy-making, and the strategies of large and small firms, interact or ‘coevolve’ with present and expected future changes in technologies.