Regime Destabilization In The Dutch Energy Transition

This book addresses learnings from the energy transition in the Netherlands. This book brings together contributions from experts in academia and practice to the Dutch energy transition by sharing their knowledge and experience gained over many years and from different roles and responsibilities. The chapters are clustered around four key perspectives – Policy, Sector, Organization, and Future – and explore the impact of policy decisions of governments and strategic decisions of firms operating in the energy sector on the energy transition process. The different perspectives present many promising strategies, policies, and innovations on each aspect, resulting in a deeper understanding of how each of these strategies, policies, and innovations may hinder or contribute to foster the energy transition. It concludes with a reflection on lessons learned and specific managerial and policy recommendations. This volume will be of great interest to students, scholars, and industry professionals researching and working in the areas of energy transitions, sustainable business, energy technology, and energy policy.

The Energy Transition, the inevitable shift away from cheap, centralized, largely fossil-based energy systems, is one of the core challenges of our time. This book provides a coherent and novel insight into the nature of this challenge and possible strategies to accelerate and guide such transitions. It brings together prominent European scholars and practitioners from the fields of energy transition research and governance to draw attention to the current complex dynamics in the energy domain, and offer elegant and provocative explanations for current crises and lock-ins. They identify multiple energy transition pathways that emerge and increasingly compete, and emphasize the need and possibilities for novel governance. By analysing the complexity of energy transition processes and the difficulties in shifting to sustainable pathways, this text questions the extent to which actually governing energy transitions is already reality, just an illusion, or a bare necessity.

Multi-Actor Multi-Criteria Analysis (MAMCA) developed by Professor Cathy Macharis enables decision-makers within the sectors of transport, mobility and logistics to account for conflicting stakeholder interests. This book draws on 15 years of research and application during which MAMCA has been deployed to support sustainable decisions within the transport and mobility sectors.

The world’s population is currently undergoing a significant transition towards urbanisation, with the UN expecting that 70% of people globally will live in cities by 2050. Urbanisation has multiple political, cultural, environmental and economic dimensions that profoundly influence social development and innovation. This fundamental long-term transformation will involve the realignment of urban society’s technologies and infrastructures, culture and lifestyles, as well as governance and institutional frameworks. Such structural systemic realignments can be referred to as urban sustainability transitions: fundamental and structural changes in urban systems through which persistent societal challenges are addressed, such as shifts towards urban farming, renewable decentralised energy systems, and social economies. This book provides new insights into how sustainability transitions unfold in different types of cities across the world and explores possible strategies for governing urban transitions, emphasising the co-evolution of material and institutional transformations in socio-technical and socio-ecological systems. With case studies of mega-cities such as Seoul, Tokyo, New York and Adelaide, medium-sized cities such as Copenhagen, Cape Town and Portland, and nonmetropolitan cities such as Freiburg, Ghent and Brighton, the book provides an opportunity to reflect upon the comparability and transferability of theoretical/conceptual constructs and governance approaches across geographical contexts. Urban Sustainability Transitions is key reading for students and scholars working in Environmental Sciences, Geography, Urban Studies, Urban Policy and Planning.

This cross-sectional, interdisciplinary study traces the “history of innovation” of renewable energies in Germany. It features five renewable energy sectors of electricity generation: biomass, photovoltaic, wind energy, geothermal energy and hydropower. The study tracks the development of the respective technologies as well as their contribution to electricity generation. It focuses on driving forces and constraints for renewable energies in the period between 1990 and today.

Over the past few decades, there has been a growing concern about the social and environmental risks which have come along with the progress achieved through a variety of mutually intertwined modernization processes. In recent years these concerns are transformed into a widely-shared sense of urgency, partly due to events such as the various pandemics threatening livestock, and increasing awareness of the risks and realities of climate change, and the energy and food crises. This sense of urgency includes an awareness that our entire social system is in need of fundamental transformation. But like the earlier transition between the 1750's and 1890's from a pre-modern to a modern industrial society, this second transition is also a contested one. Sustainable development is only one of many options. This book addresses the issue on how to understand the dynamics and governance of the second transition dynamics in order to ensure sustainable development. It will be necessary reading for students and scholars with an interest in sustainable development and long-term transformative change.