The Political Economy of Advancing Low-Carbon Transitions: Policy, Technology, and Coalition Change

Abstract

Public policy plays a key role in inducing and accelerating low-carbon innovation and technological change needed to mitigate dangerous levels of climate change. Prime examples of such innovation include, but are not limited to, the transition to renewable energy technologies in electricity generation, and the advent of battery-electric vehicles in the transport sector. There is growing evidence that policy-induced low-carbon technological change can reshape the interests, preferences, and political strategies of powerful actors towards decarbonization (Breetz, Mildenberger, and Stokes 2018; Lockwood et al. 2017). Existing scholarship suggests that such feedbacks have altered both elite politics, including advocacy coalitions or business groups (Meckling 2019; Schmid, Sewerin, and Schmidt 2019), and mass politics, like voting behavior (Stokes 2016). Over time, these dynamics can increase the political feasibility of more ambitious sequential climate policy (Meckling et al. 2015). Political science research on the co-evolution of public policy and low-carbon innovation is nascent but growing fast, and highlights critical avenues for future research. Political scientists and transition scholars, for instance, have to date insufficiently engaged with the mechanisms and magnitudes of feedback dynamics: it remains unclear, for example, how exactly change processes related to technology and policy feedbacks re-shape interests, preferences, and political strategies, and how such changes result in new power balances and forms of political engagement and mobilization. In this panel, we explore how policy and technology developments for the advancement of low-carbon innovation—characterized by competitive energy technologies and sub-system spillovers—can shift political dynamics and affect the conditions under which transformative policy change is possible. The papers focus on how change processes shape interest formation, the creation of new alliances and advocacy coalitions, and the institutional and political dynamics of efforts toward system reconfiguration. The papers also seek to advance novel theoretical and methodological approaches for analyzing the role of policy-induced technological change in the re-making of interests and policy institutions. We invite contributions on these topics related to ongoing low-carbon transitions in electricity generation, transport, and beyond. Bibliography Breetz, Hanna, Matto Mildenberger, and Leah Stokes. 2018. “The Political Logics of Clean Energy Transitions.” Business and Politics 20(4): 492–522. Lockwood, Matthew, Caroline Kuzemko, Catherine Mitchell, and Richard Hoggett. 2017. “Historical Institutionalism and the Politics of Sustainable Energy Transitions: A Research Agenda.” Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space 35(2): 312–33. Meckling, Jonas. 2019. “Governing Renewables: Policy Feedback in a Global Energy Transition.” Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space 37(2): 317–38. Meckling, Jonas, Nina Kelsey, Eric Biber, and John Zysman. 2015. “Winning Coalitions for Climate Policy.” Science 349(6253): 1170–71. Schmid, Nicolas, Sebastian Sewerin, and Tobias S. Schmidt. 2019. “Explaining Advocacy Coalition Change with Policy Feedback.” Policy Studies Journal. Stokes, Leah C. 2016. “Electoral Backlash against Climate Policy: A Natural Experiment on Retrospective Voting and Local Resistance to Public Policy.” American Journal of Political Science 60(4): 958–74.

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