Dr David Tyfield, Co-Director, Centre for Mobilities Research, Lancaster University

One of the greatest challenges regarding contemporary research into socio-technical transition concerns the possibility of ‘sustainable transport’.  Transportation, which accounts for at least one quarter of global greenhouse gas emissions, is key to efforts to mitigate ‘climate change’.  But with the particularly ‘locked-in’ and entrenched socio-technical system of ‘automobility’ at the core of contemporary mobility, it is also arguably a uniquely challenging case for low-carbon transition.  In this respect, perhaps the most significant single development is the recent transformation of mobility within contemporary China.  In little more than 3 decades, China has gone from a society dominated by bicycles and beasts of burden to the largest car market in the world, and with prospects for massive further growth.  Conversely, China is also engaged in an experiment regarding electric vehicles that is receiving globally unique levels of governmental and corporate support.

The talk will introduce a new 30-month ESRC project – involving colleagues at Lancaster, SPRU, the STEPS Centre and in China – that will explore the broader prospects for low-carbon transition in China.  Focusing on the work package on low-carbon e-mobility by way of illustration, the talk will ask in particular how thinking about low-carbon transition in the entirely different socio-economic, political and cultural context of China forces a confrontation with some key challenges for contemporary theories of low-carbon innovation and system transition.  In particular, while acknowledging the significant insights and benefits of two theoretical perspectives emerging as dominant in this field – the ‘multi-level perspective’ and practice theory – both need also to place issues of power at the heart of their analyses.  In this way, the specific and different challenges of constructing an ‘entrepreneurial state’ in China (vs. for example in the UK) may also be illuminated.

Everyone welcome.