Top-down sustainability transitions in action: Strategies for accelerating electric mobility diffusion in China, Japan and California

Most sustainability transitions literature views socio-technical change as a bottom-up process driven by grassroot actors, new entrants and open-ended experimentation in small, protected niches (Roberts et al., 2018; Rotmans et al., 2001; Turnheim and Geels, 2019). Meanwhile, incumbent actors in government and industry are frequently portrayed as hampering change (Turnheim and Sovacool, 2020). This prevailing view is increasingly criticised. First, in explaining potential mechanisms of societal change, scholarship appears to reflect a Western and normative bias towards bottom-up, participatory approaches (Ghosh and Schot, 2019). Second, dominating theories fail to explain countless examples of socio-technical and industrial transformation—in both Western and non-Western contexts—where incumbent state and industry actors and top-down, managerial approaches exploiting traditional public policy instruments (Johnstone and Newell, 2018; Roberts and Geels, 2019) are the primary engines of change. Conversely, although developmental state literature can explain such mechanisms (Johnson, 1999; Woo-Cummings, 1999), efforts to integrate this understanding into transitions scholarship are scarce. This paper thus aims to build theoretical and empirical understanding into strategies that incumbent government and industry actors can exploit to accelerate socio-technical transitions. We begin by marrying knowledge from sustainability transitions and the developmental state into a comprehensive framework. We then apply this to a triple case study on China, Japan and California to empirically examine strategies used by incumbents to accelerate the ongoing transition towards battery and hydrogen mobility. Building a rich dataset comprised of some 50 interviews and hundreds of documents, we examine the principle strategies used, influencing factors and variations over time while briefly considering outcomes and limitations. As expected, we found that incumbent policymakers and firms actively utilised top-down, managerial-style instruments such as centralised planning, state-industry collaboration, industry nurturing and infrastructure development. These strategies all involve traditional instruments emphasised by developmental state and public policy scholars such as planning, state investments and regulation. Yet, we also find that each case simultaneously employs strategies reflecting bottom-up and network-based approaches championed by transition scholars. These include niche creation, knowledge diffusion and production, coalition building, and market-incentives. Thus, while demonstrating the need for policy mixes of diverse instruments when pursuing transitions, our cases illustrate that governance paradigms that are often conceived as separate approaches (Roberts and Geels, 2019) are not necessarily ‘oil and water,’ and that simultaneous application can occur. We also found some dimensions heavily emphasised in transitions literature to be lacking across the cases. These notably included diverse actor representation, political lobbying and open-ended exploration. On the other hand, by shielding domestic enterprises from foreign competition, China’s case demonstrates a unique strategy of industry protection that has not received much attention from transitions scholars. Based on these findings, we propose that transitions scholars heed more attention to the important role of incumbent actors (Turnheim and Geels, 2019) and better account for nuances, blurriness and co-existing modes of practice in cases not confirming to established theories. We also encourage further efforts to cross-fertilise transitions scholarship with other fields examining the role of state actors in environmental governance and industrial transformation.