Converging Agendas? Energy and Climate Change Policies in the UK

Heather Lovell, Harriet Bulkeley and Susan Owens
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Heather Lovell: Centre for the Study of Environmental Change and Sustainability, School of Geosciences, University of Edinburgh, Drummond Street, Edinburgh EH8 9XP, Scotland
Harriet Bulkeley: Department of Geography, University of Durham, South Road, Durham DH1 3LE, England
Susan Owens: Department of Geography, University of Cambridge, Downing Place, Cambridge CB2 3EN, England

Environment and Planning C, 2009, vol. 27, issue 1, 90-109

Abstract: In the UK climate change and energy have converged on the policy agenda. We discuss the implications for theories of policy change based on well-defined networks located within single, discrete, policy domains. We suggest that such approaches struggle to account for the dynamics of change in conditions of policy convergence. The issue of climate change has opened up and destabilised the UK energy policy sector, but this process has been surprisingly free of conflict, despite radical policy shifts. To date, convergence of the energy and climate change sectors has largely occurred at a discursive level, and we focus our attention on a number of different, but largely complementary, storylines about solutions to climate change. We draw on ideas about sociotechnical regime transitions, first, to explore why the storylines are not in obvious conflict, and, second, to identify small-scale niches where tensions in storylines do emerge as discourse is translated into material reality.

Date: 2009
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:envirc:v:27:y:2009:i:1:p:90-109

DOI: 10.1068/c0797j

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