This is a collaborative project involving Andy Stirling, co-director of the STEPS Centre and SPRU, Pierre-Benoit Joly at INRA in Paris, Peter Stegmaier at TSG in Dortmund and led by Stefan Kuhlmann in Twente.
About the project
With the Sussex research focusing on the particular case of nuclear energy, the project as a whole seeks to investigate using a variety of case studies, how technology governance can address the crucial task of disengaging from well-established socio-technical systems.
This involves detailed scrutiny of the means by which governance can deliberately resist and counter the interests of powerful incumbent actors to consolidate their own favoured pathways.
The aim is to help build instead pathways that better serve the interests of less powerful and more marginal groups. This task of destabilising dominant pathways relates very closely to research underway in the STEPS Centre highlighting the crucial role played by power in the establishing of this kind of sociotechnical dominance.