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"System Building as Missing Link in Sustainability Transitions: Developing, Validating and Reflecting a Framework for the Upper Rhine Region"

The project analyses what is needed for sustainability transitions to lead to new functioning and sustainable systems. Sustainability transitions, i.e., fundamental changes in socio-technical systems such as energy and food, are a dominant theme in European policy making, such as in the European Green Deal. Research has developed a deep understanding of how innovations emerge in these systems, how they accelerate, and how they eventually put existing regimes under pressure to change. However, there is a lack of understanding of the late stage of such transitions, the consolidation or establishment of alternative functioning systems that are considered more sustainable than the previous ones. The project explores this stage of sustainability transitions, which is called system building. This includes a conceptual analysis, a first validation in the energy and food systems as well as an application to regional transformation activities in the Upper Rhine region.

"Options for an electricity market design to finance a fully renewable electricity system"

An increasing share of renewable energies will lead to significant changes in the electricity markets. The very low marginal costs of electricity from renewable energy sources will result in wholesale prices close to zero. This raises the question of how renewables and flexibility options can be financed in a system based on 100 % renewables. What are the challenges for the market design, which options are available and what is relevant for the transformation. These questions are currently being increasingly discussed both from the scientific and political side (beyond short-term measures to limit rising electricity prices due to the Russian attack on Ukraine). This project aims to provide a structured overview and assessment of different options and feed them into the discussions.

Dierk participated in this conference in Dresden. Together with Regina Rhodius he took care of the sessions on “Reallabore als politisch-regulative Testräume”.

Dierk contributed to the workshop “Scaling or phasing out experiments in STI policy: Assessment needs”, organised by the OECD Working Group on Innovation and Technology Policy on April 22, 2024. The workshop was organised in two parts: Part 1 on scaling experiments in STI policy. Part 2  on monitoring and evaluation of experiments in STI policy. It discussed embracing a shift towards a culture of policy experimentation in government at scale by the STI policymakers and assessing and evaluating impacts of these policy experiments. Dierk provided an input to the session “Beyond the hype: When and how can sandboxes succeed in fostering breakthrough moonshot innovations?

Caterina Pacini is going to participate as presenter at the IST 24 Conference “Sustainability Transitions and Nature" taking place from the 17th to the 19th of June in Oslo.

Find further details of her contribution here.

The theme of the 15th IST conference is ‘Sustainability transitions and nature’. Sustainability transition research investigates social and technical change processes in solving environmental problems including possible social injustices, tensions, and dilemmas associated with these. The focus on the ‘social’ and the ‘technical’ often externalize the natural world treating it instead as part of the ‘landscape’ of transitions. Nature—broadly understood as the biophysical environment—thus remains an often overlooked but important dimension in the STRN research agenda.

The point of departure for sustainability transitions research is that existing production-consumption systems are environmentally unsustainable and need to transform. As such sustainability transitions therefore aim to preserve the natural environment in its current Holocene state. This simplistic understanding of the relationships between sustainability transitions and nature is increasingly becoming inadequate for understanding transition dynamics.