The European Environmental Evaluators Network (EEEN) kicked off over three years ago, in 2012, in an event organised by the University of Leuven and by the now director of the European Environment Agency (EEA), Hans Bruyninckx. Taking example of the Environmental Evaluators Network (EEN) in North America, and endorsed by Matt Keene at the US EPA, the idea of EEEN has focused on bringing together those who develop, carry out or with an interest in environmental policy evaluation to exchange experiences. The informal advisory group of the network is composed of members from several European countries and the US.
Last week, a fourth EEEN forum was organised over the course of two days in the beautiful city of Florence in Tuscany, Italy. It was hosted by the European University Institute and organised by the EEA. The theme of this year’s event was Knowledge from Climate & Environment Policy Evaluation Supporting the Road from Paris to 2020.
What was particularly great about the event, similarly to last year, was that it stimulated discussions between not only academics, but people working in European institutions such as the Commission, the Parliament and the EEA, in national government bodies such as the Department of Energy and Climate Change and the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs in the UK and Mistra and the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency in Sweden, the private sector including Endesa, and academics from over a dozen universities and research institutes. The joint discussions produced many insights on various different angles related to knowledge, transitions and evaluation methods.
The key insights for me were the following:
• There is an increasing interest in and need for evaluating public policies from a transitional and transformative perspective, but for this we need to develop new evaluation methods and criteria, and undertake evaluations from a more complex system dynamics perspective.
A great deal of very systematic and rigorous evaluation work is being done in different national government departments and agencies, including DECC and the Department for International Development and the EEA alike (paying attention to the above point). This offers valuable sources for knowledge exchange between evaluators and a potential for learning, also for the academics.
Although governance innovation and policy experiments are recognised as necessary to complement or even replace the existing means of (ineffective) climate governance, not much attention has yet been paid to evaluating policy experiments and particularly producing aggregated evaluations or meta-analyses of multiple policy or governance experiments (linking to the work being done in the context of the EU COST INOGOV network).
A blog post by Nick Gallie on the language of climate science following the Tyndall Assembly 2015
Hopes for a legally binding “hard” international agreement amongst nations attending the 21st COP in Paris in December are fading. A more likely outcome is a “strong symbolic agreement” with a built in review mechanism that would allow the “Paris Treaty” to be revisited and updated on a regular basis. As the prospects for a binding agreement slip away, so does optimism that the world can keep within the so-called 2 degrees of warming “safe Limit” that is the nominal policy objective of the UNFCCC. That limit itself, from a climate science perspective looks increasingly inappropriate. At last week’s Tyndall Assembly – a gathering of climate scientists, policy academics, psychologists, energy industry and UK Government representatives, held at the University of Sussex, the mood was very much that even with a global warming target of 1.5 degrees over pre-industrial temperatures, the world would be pushing its luck.
What language then, would be appropriate to describe the impacts of climate change and their risk of occurrence should the world, as looks increasingly likely, find itself committed to “somewhere between three and five degrees” of warming by the end of the century? Language matters a great deal, because policy and action consequent upon policy are determined by it. Policy is constructed and construed within language; it matters profoundly, for example, whether science advice to policy makers is couched in terms of “danger” or in terms of “adverse or negative consequences”.
Climate science, understandably enough, is concerned with being able to make measurable observations of real world events and quantify probabilities, but policy makers (who are people) and people at large lead their lives in terms of quality, and they respond only to qualitative threats to life as they know it or would have it. Quantity is only of interest as a bearing on quality. We forget this. The “negative impact” that a risk assessment seeks to evaluate is a qualitative event, not a quantity. A 2 degrees of warming notional boundary is set with respect to increasing likelihoods of qualitatively devastating events occurring as the climate changes in response massive energy build-ups within the global atmosphere.
The language of carbon, carbon dioxide, two degrees, mitigation, adaptation, even the term climate change itself, are hopelessly abstract and completely fail to express or capture quality. The focus on a chemical element (carbon) takes the eye off the interests behind the daily decisions that ensure the planet’s energy balance is thrown ever more out of kilter. This is a major reason why ‘climate change” has so significantly failed to engage policy makers and the public at large in the sense of triggering dramatic action and fundamental change necessary to avert a global lock-in to a catastrophic future.
But the linguistic problem, surely the most easy to solve among this problem of problems that constitutes climate change, turns out not to be not so easy at all. The scale – the global framing, the futurity, the imponderability of climate negotiation mechanisms, all these ways of talking about it, drag climate change out of the reach of lives lived now and crucially, out of reach of qualitative affect. Unless of course one’s life is visited by a climate induced event that shatters one’s sense of place in the world. But for the vast majority of us who live in advanced economies, this has not the case.
How about systemic threat? How about the combined effects of crop failure, mass starvation, heat stroke, water stress, economic collapse, endemic conflict, enforced mass migration (refugees or economic migrants?), new pandemics, of which we are witnessing only the tip of the iceberg (to use a very unfortunate metaphor) today? Does it help to take a systems view of climate change impacts if one-off events don’t cut it? But then we are driven to the limit of language to even begin to describe what all this might mean in terms of quality, of suffering, of consequence.
Where is this driving? In the Tyndall Assembly it was noted how the language of climate science and policy is already sliding further and further into the abstract, necessary perhaps to ameliorate the collective failure (not ours, surely) to address the reality unfolding before us; language whose quantity is multiplying exponentially along with the number of aspects and avenues of the problematique that analysis reveals, while its quality is more and more sifted of affective potential. A sliding language that retreats lock step with sliding policy goals and the determination to meet them. We are like the hare, caught in the headlamps of the thing that is bearing down upon us but which we can neither describe nor react to because, like the hare, we don’t have the language for it.
We ask, what can we do right now, we who are dumbstruck in the face our finitude? And the answer is speak . To pull climate change into the present, to bring it down to our size, we have first to make it present in our lives so that it touches and hurts. Take a leaf out of Chris Rapley’s book (subject of a brilliant Royal Court Theatre performance earlier this year) 2071, The world we will leave our grandchildren, or go for a walk among wildflowers and chase butterflies whose fate is already sealed – and weep. Our first duty is to make this thing real in our own lives, by whatever means, and then from that feeling, from that realisation of quality – act within our own spheres of influence, limited though these most certainly are. Action has a strange quality. In the presentness of action, boundaries dissolve and the nature of what is possible opens up. Anyone who has taken “political” action will tell you this is true.
Did I say something inappropriate. A slip of the tongue, surely? Does feeling really have a place in an academic science policy forum? This was the subject of a debate in the University of Sussex’s Politics of Nature forum that ran simultaneously with the Tyndall Assembly. A great pity there was no cross over between the events. Without feeling, the forum mused, how are the people to rise up – us in whose name the world is being consigned to oblivion.
Nick Gallie is a Doctoral Researcher (PhD Candidate) at the Science Policy Research Unit (SPRU), Sussex University
Born and Educated in Scotland, Nick attained an MA Hons in Economic Science from the University of Aberdeen in 1970 before moving to London and taking up a career in advertising, new product development and organisational communications. During the ’80s and ’90s Nick worked at Greenpeace in the UK, first as fundraiser then Creative Director, Campaigns and Communications Director and finally Logistics (Direct Action) Director. In 2000 He set up a consultancy specializing in campaign and communications design before returning to academia in 2010 to study Human Rights and Science Policy. Nick enjoys hill walking and horse riding and both practicing and studying tai chi and meditation. Nick tweets at @nickgtweet
The starkly differing nuclear policies of Germany and the UK present perhaps the clearest divergence in developed world energy strategies. Under the current major Energy Transition (Energiewende), Germany is seeking to entirely phase out nuclear power by 2022. Yet the UK has for many years advocated a “nuclear renaissance”, promoting the most ambitious new nuclear construction programme in Western Europe. A close look at what’s happening makes the contrast look very odd indeed.
Nowhere is that difference more obvious than in the impending decision of British energy minister Amber Rudd, over arguably the most expensive single infrastructure project in British history: the Hinkley Point C power station.
Recent research at SPRU has investigated a key aspect of this conundrum. It began with a simple yet fundamental question: how to understand these massively contrasting developments in the two such otherwise similar countries as the UK and Germany? There is no shortage of academic theory about why particular technologies are developed and others abandoned, but these turn out to be interestingly incomplete.
What is clear at the outset, is that technological progress in any given sector – like electricity – is not a one-track “race to the future”. In these simplistic terms, so-called pro-innovation policies reduce the debate to the level of “how fast?”, “what’s the risk?”; and “who’s leading?”. Instead, general understandings developed across history, economics, philosophy and social science show the real questions are about “which way?”; “who says?”; and “why?” Technological choices like those for and against nuclear power are as much a matter for democracy as for technical expertise. In other words, these should be treated as openly as other political issues, to be decided in ways that are responsible, open and transparent. To deal with such issues democratically also means that decisions are accountable to all those who stand to be affected and in whose name they have been taken.
But specific theories about how to achieve such technological transitions, do not tend to emphasise this democratic aspect. Highlighted instead are ways to encourage technological niches (like renewables) and how to stabilise these into an updated regime, in this case existing electricity systems. Until recently, less attention has been given to the roles played by deliberate efforts to discontinue an entrenched old regime, which (like the German nuclear industry) it is the aim of government to replace.
So what we get instead of a public debate is a host of much more detailed technical policy interventions in areas such as regulation, research, subsidies, market structure, contracts and training. This tends to lead only to incremental and conservative adjustments rather than ambitious transformation.
The German Alternative
To investigate these dilemmas, we considered thirty different parameters variously mentioned across all the different theories, to see which ones best explained the contrasting directions of policy in the UK and Germany. We grouped these into nine broadly relevant criteria addressing issues like: general market conditions; nuclear contributions to electricity mixes; strengths in nuclear engineering; costs and potential of renewables; strengths in renewable industries; scales of military nuclear interests; general political characteristics; public opinion and social movements; and contrasts in overall “qualities of democracy” (as measured in a burgeoning field of political science).
Some findings seem potentially quite important, and in direct practical ways for nuclear policy. In short, the criteria wrongly predict that it would be the UK, rather than Germany, which should be more likely to steer electricity systems away from nuclear power. After all, before the Energiewende, it was the UK that had: a relatively weak civil nuclear industry; a low nuclear fraction in the electricity mix; the best renewable energy resources; and a strong offshore industry that might gain from the harnessing renewables.
German activists at a rally to support energy policy changes . REUTERS/Fabrizio Bensch
Until recently, Germany hosted the most successful nuclear engineering industry in the world. It had a high proportion of its electricity from nuclear and the more statist German style of capitalism is also more favourable to nuclear (with its need for government support). Patterns of public opinion have long been pretty similar in the two countries. All those criteria conventionally emphasised in mainstream theory predict the opposite of the observed pattern.
In fact, only two criteria clearly predict a move in Germany rather than the UK. Firsstrong UK military nuclear interests and the unanimous verdict in the political science literature, that Germany ranks markedly higher than the UK in terms of key “qualities of democracy” like those mentioned above. But these broader political qualities – including transparency, participation and accountability – are excluded from normal policy analysis in this field.
Rudderless
It is remarkable that military implications remain virtually unmentioned not only in official UK nuclear policy documents, but in wider media and even critical debate. If this is a factor in the internationally unusual British enthusiasm for nuclear power, then this public silence itself raises issues of democratic accountability. We investigate this issue in a recent separate article.
But whatever might be this specific military dimension, the key message from our analysis is very clear. It is extraordinarily difficult to understand why Germany rather than the UK should be moving away from nuclear power, without being drawn to the relative qualities of democracy in the two countries. Whether this is right or wrong, it is very significant that it is Germany that has been able to mount an effective challenge to the concentrated power and entrenched interests around nuclear energy. Also perhaps relevant, is the fact that Germany has a track record of consistently making these kinds of enlightened decision earlier than the UK (on issues like acid rain, pesticides, recycling and clean production) – whilst remaining arguably the world’s most successful industrial economy.
So the practical message seems quite profound. General British debates over directions for innovation – around nuclear energy as in other areas like GMOs – are presently not primarily seen as matters for democracy; in effect they are not deemed suitable for public debate. Yet the troubled history of nuclear power itself – as with other technological issues like asbestos, phthalidomide and chemical pollution – shows how accountabilities neglected earlier, have a habit of being strongly asserted later. Perhaps this is something Amber Rudd might bear in mind, when making her impending momentous decision on Hinkley Point.
During the last week SPRU hosted the 6th International Sustainability Transitions conference with a program packed with high quality presentations. For the first time it also included a suite of student led activities that we will present here.
Following last year’s successful conference in Utrecht, the organising committee recognised the need for catering more specifically for PhDs and early career researchers. This effort was co-developed by an emerging network of students and the organising committee, building on the momentum generated by other PhD-led events (e.g. SPRU DPhil Day and Stadtkolloquium). With that mandate, a group comprising 40 PhD students came together in the months prior to the conference.
On Tuesday, this group convened a Newcomer’s session comprised of a short introduction to the history of the field and a discussion about its future prospects. With a packed auditorium, Professor John Grin gave an overview of the origins of the field, briefly discussing the diversity of approaches used to studying transitions, namely socio-technical, complex systems, reflexive governance, social practices and the innovation systems approach. This was followed by a personal reflection by Adrian Smith, who argued that in the end, the IST-community consists of ‘a bunch of people asking very important but difficult questions, and trying to understand a possible plurality of answers.’ A range of speakers followed, with insights into ongoing debates in the field. In the discussion, questions were raised about the internationalisation of transitions research, the demand for practical examples of unfolding transitions, and the need to clarify the sustainability dimensions of the transitions we study. Other questions were compiled and will be circulated to the panelists to continue the discussion.
On Wednesday, the network convened a Skill Development Session – a panel discussion with professionals and academics that aimed at showcasing non-academic careers and exploring what is distinctive (skills, mindsets, attitudes) about careers in sustainability. The speakers engaged critically with the topic, demonstrating how conventional perspectives on careers – driven by narrow notions of success – are hard to conciliate with the normative and ethical commitments that drive the work in sustainability. In fact, most of their actual experiences escape the implicit template of what a good career is; they were marked by little planning, a lot of passion and serendipity. Sharing such experiences and questioning those very templates can help students thrive, alleviating some of the pressures they face.
Throughout the conference, PhD students facilitated a series of sessions for eliciting an input for the STRN research agenda. All conference attendees worked in groups chaired by a PhD student, with each group submitting a short description of a research topic. There were 22 high quality submissions, with six emerging themes that were presented at the closing plenary (or in #IST2015RA). These group sessions provided opportunities for breaking some of the patterns of interaction that dominate conferences, bringing together attendees that might not have met otherwise. In most cases, the groups were a welcoming space for newcomers and students. The research agenda input is now being synthesised by those involved in coordinating the activity.
In our opinion, the PhD-led activities made a valuable contribution to the conference by creating opportunities for reflecting on the history of the academic field (newcomers’ session), for actively shaping its future (research agenda) and for recognising potential pathways outside of academia (skills development session). We believe that efforts like ours are important for creating entry points for new researchers and practitioners to engage more meaningfully with the contents of the event, that can be overwhelming at first.
We sought to be inclusive in the organisation and in the session themselves, and we recognise there is much that could be improved in our efforts. The skills development session was still too focused on academic perspectives, and biased towards success stories. The research agenda sessions took away the afternoon breaks, and not all groups developed the dynamics we were aiming for. In fact, some of the groups were immobilised by the power dynamics of senior and newcomers working together. Nevertheless, some of the shortcomings of these sessions show how we have just started to put in practice what we preach with regards to experimenting and learning by doing so in protected spaces and bottom-up processes; these are is important not only in the empirics of what we study, but should also be at the core of what we do as a community. Reflexivity and inclusivity are not characteristics that we achieve, but rather something we should continually strive for.
Last but not least, organising these PhD-led sessions gave traction to the emergence of a PhD-network, an informal community catering to the specific needs of students and early career researchers. In the future, this PhD/ECR Transitions Network will contribute to this research community by facilitating an online forum for discussion, and by organising workshops, discussions and training sessions aimed at PhD’s and ECR’s in conferences and stand-alone events. This community is at an early stage of development, and all ideas and contributions are appreciated. If you are interested in joining this network, send an e-mail to welcome2transitions@gmail.com
Twitter: @jonas_torrens; @gijsdiercks; #IST2015RA
Jonas started as doctoral researcher at SPRU (Science Policy Research Unit) in September 2014, working primarily on system innovations and sustainability transitions. He started his career as an engineer and has since moved into interdisciplinary research, seeking to understand what hinders the transformations necessary for sustainability.
Prior to this, Jonas worked at the Stockholm Resilience Centre as research assistant, mainly supporting the Planetary Boundaries Research Initiative with research synthesis on global environmental change. Among other tasks, Jonas was project manager and instructional designer for a massive open online course (MOOC) entitled ‘Planetary Boundaries and Human Opportunities’ that was developed in conjunction with the Sustainable Development Solution Network (UNSDSN). His previous experience also includes R&D in diverse aspect of renewable energy and biofuels and project management of large research projects (3 M€ portfolio).
Jonas is very multicultural and speaks English, Portuguese, French and Spanish. He grew up in Brazil, and has since studied and worked in Sweden, France and Spain and now the United Kingdom.
Gijs Diercks is a doctoral researcher at the Centre for Environmental Policy. His research is in innovation policy for sustainability transitions. Key areas of research are changes in concepts of innovation in response to environmental sustainability and climate change such as business model and systems innovation, socio-technical innovation, place based innovation and the network model of innovation.
His research is funded by the Making Transitions Happen platform of Climate-Kic, who’s goal is to integrate innovation, education and entrepreneurship activities for socio-technical transitions. It is a cross-disciplinary platform acting as enabler and accelerator of the transition to a low carbon economy. With a focus on policy interventions and challenge led, practice based models of innovation it engages citizens, communities and companies.
I was recently invited to give a talk at the Citenel Seenel conference hosted by the Brazilian Power Regulatory Agency (ANEEL) on 17-19th August in Sauipe, Bahia. The biannual Innovation and Energy Efficiency Seminar (VIII Citenel and IV Seenel) brings together industry, academia and government to discuss results and impacts of research and experience on Brazil’s R&D and Energy Efficiency Programme.
My talk was on the 2nd day of the conference, in a panel which focused on consumer behaviour and experiences from countries outside Brazil. While I focused on the UK experience, outlining recent policy changes such as the removal of the Green Deal and Zero Carbon Homes requirements, I also highlighted that throughout the years the UK has had a mix of policies which have addressed household energy efficiency including regulation, subsidies, voluntary agreements and supplier obligations. What we still seem to lack though, is evidence of long-term results on if and how behaviour change occurs, and if it does, how long it can be sustained. Consumer behaviour on energy consumption is a complex area and companies such as Opower are developing ways to profile customer data and visualise consumption to the end-user, as outlined in his presentation by Angel Sustaeta, Managing Director for Opower Latin America.
Howard Geller, founder and Executive Director of Southwest Energy Efficiency Project (SWEEP) in Boulder, Colorado, US, gave an excellent overview of utility energy efficiency programmes in the US. In the US, electric utility policy is adopted at the state level and each state also has a regulatory agency that regulates private utilities. Measures such as rebates on energy efficiency products have been especially popular.
Howard Geller from SWEEP gave an overview of energy efficiency programmes in the US.
Mari Martiskainen
Mari Martiskainen
Aurelia Figueroa from the German Development Institute (DIE), meanwhile, provided a case study of industrial energy efficiency programmes in South Africa, showing that behavioural change is not only relevant in the household sector but also plays a key part in industry, especially when new programmes are being introduced.
During the Q&A session it became clear that our audience was keen to take on board many of the issues that we highlighted. One key question focused around knowledge on consumer behaviour and how to create baseline consumer data information in a country where collection of personal energy consumption data is currently not possible due to legislation. As the average household energy consumption in Brazil is 180 kilowatt hours per month, sufficient data is vital in order to identify high energy users. There were also questions on whether smarter appliances could also create smarter consumers, an area which provides both opportunities and challenges given the staying power of established habits.
Consumer behaviour is affected by various factors including cultural and social norms and there is not a ‘one-size-fits-all’ solution to it. However, events such as the Citenel Seenel provide excellent opportunities for identifying aspects of what policies and measures have been tested, what has worked or not worked, and what context-free learning can be taken back home.
Dr Mari Martiskainen is a Research Fellow at the Centre on Innovation and Energy Demand. Mari joined SPRU in 2006 and has worked on a range of research projects including topics such as building energy efficiency policies, innovation processes linked to community energy, influences on household energy consumption and the diffusion of small scale renewable energy technologies.
