Integrating techno-economic, socio-technical and political perspectives on energy transitions

Cherp, Aleh, Vadim Vinichenko, Jessica Jewell, Elina Brutschin, and Benjamin K Sovacool. 2018. “Integrating Techno-Economic, Socio-Technical and Political Perspectives on National Energy Transitions: a Meta-Theoretical Framework.” Energy Research & Social Science 37: 175–90. doi:10.1016/j.erss.2017.09.015.

Since low-carbon energy transitions involve changes in energy markets, energy technologies and energy policies, we need techno-economic, socio-technical and political knowledge to understand such transitions. The difficulty here is that the relevant disciplines - energy economics, sociology of technology, and political science - cannot easily speak to each other because they use different concepts, theories, and methods. In a new paper we propose a common language for these disciplines to communicate about energy transitions. This language is inspired by Elinor Ostrom's (a Nobel Prize laureate in economics) work on bringing together economists, sociologists and political scientists to study governance of socio-ecological systems.

The proposed framework for analysing national energy transitions is structured along the three fields of knowledge, which we call  the 'three perspectives on energy transitions': techno-economic with its roots in energy economics and energy systems analysis, socio-technical, with its roots in sociology of technology and Science, Technology and Society (STS) studies, and political, with its roots in political science. For each perspective, we define 'top-level variables', as shown in the figure below. We explain how to analyse national energy transitions through expanding these variables into more detailed second- and third-level variables and constructing explanatory models of transitions.