What can we say about accelerating low-carbon transitions?

A new study by Bennett Institute’s Benjamin Sovacool and co-authors provides a comprehensive insight into the phenomenon of acceleration and its links to sustainability transitions drawing on insights from several social science disciplines and fields. The paper maps out concepts or tools that are useful for better understanding or interpreting acceleration; reflects on prominent themes and topics and identifies research gaps and fruitful directions.

The work explores five single dimensions of acceleration:

1. Economics – Economic theory suggests that, for the most part, the diffusion of low-carbon technologies markedly accelerates when costs fall (or are expected to fall) below existing ‘dirty’ technologies.
2. Technology – Technologies can be both a subject of acceleration (i.e. accelerated diffusion or performance improvements) as well as a driver of acceleration in wider transition dynamics.
3. Businesses & firms – Acceleration becomes technologically feasible when low-carbon alternatives have experienced major advances along their learning curves and reached a stage of maturity characterized by cost reductions, increases in functionality and market competitiveness.
4. Policy institutions and governance – Many sustainable technologies are initially more costly, more risky for investors and at the same time do not necessarily offer new services or products. Renewable electricity technologies provide a good example. For these reasons accelerating their adoption is critically dependent on supporting policies.
5. Behaviour and culture – Human behaviour plays a key role in accelerated change. Social and cultural factors, along with psychological characteristics, affect people’s willingness to acquire new technologies.

Interactions and complex mechanisms

The paper further explores interactions and complex mechanisms of acceleration and the user roles in different phases of transitions. Thinking about acceleration in a multi-mechanism and multi-system perspective reveals cross-cutting challenges related to overall resource needs (materials, land-use, finance, human capital, etc.) and to the importance of ensuring common directionality across systems.

The paper also presents multiple views of what research views acceleration is, offering what the authors call a ‘prismatic’ perspective from multiple angles and foci. Some view acceleration as a process of merely scaling up technical innovations or practices, but others situate acceleration as a particular temporal phase in transition studies. Still other research discusses acceleration as a normative imperative, whereas other approaches use multiple systems as their unit of analysis.

Acceleration – a phenomenon

Acceleration represents a truly sociotechnical phenomenon, one that consists of single-mechanism conceptualisations such as technology or policy alongside multi-actor mechanisms such as tipping points or regime destabilisation. Even though the team of authors involved in drafting this study was relatively small, there is a surprising and perhaps even confounding variety in single-mechanism and multi-mechanism perspectives revealed by the review. To be clear, the authors consider this study a starting point for acceleration research, where we attempt to ‘open up’ the discussion and debate about which perspectives are relevant, where they fit, what may be missing, and what needs to be clarified.

Read the full paper

This article is a summary of a research paper:

Sovacool, BK, FW Geels, AD Andersen, M Grubb , AJ Jordan, F Kern, PKivimaa, M Lockwood, J Markard1, J Meadowcroft, J Meckling, B Moore, R Raven, KS Rogge, D Rosenbloom, TS Schmidt, J Schot, D Sharp, J Stephenson, I Vormedal, K Yang. “The acceleration of low-carbon transitions: Insights, concepts, challenges, and new directions for research,” Energy Research & Social Science 121 (March, 2025), 103948, pp. 1-26