EMPOCI: Governing sustainable energy-mobility transitions
Find out about the EMPOCI project
The EMPOCI project, led by Professor Karoline Rogge, is investigating how to accelerate the low-carbon transition in energy and mobility systems at a regional and national level.
Tackling the climate emergency means rapidly decarbonising our production and consumption systems, particularly in the increasingly interconnected energy and mobility systems.
But how should governments navigate their way between competing climate policy interests and industrial policy concerns, while accelerating sustainability transitions?
Answering this question calls for a re-examination of effective policy mixes for delivering rapid decarbonization and green competitiveness, and a consideration of the politics and policies of green transition processes.
The EMPOCI project has three main aims:
- To provide new understandings of the global interplay between multi-level policy mixes and low-carbon innovations in socio-technical transitions
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To develop and test new methodological tools enabling both deep and broad insights into the drivers and barriers in transition processes towards sustainability
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To co-design practical strategies for accelerating sustainable energy-mobility transitions, supporting the Paris Agreement in combating climate change.
Get the latest project updates by following EMPOCI on Twitter.
The EMPOCI team on their 2021 away day at Seven Sisters Country Park, and in 2022 at Brighton's Royal Pavilion:
Asli Ates, Karoline Rogge, Qi Song and Nicholas Goedeking.
- Methodology
EMPOCI employs a multi-method research design combining qualitative and quantitative methods to investigate the governance of sustainable energy-mobility transitions. This includes multi-actor case studies and surveys, transformative foresight processes, and data analytics of policies, agency and innovation dynamics.
EMPOCI will analyse the innovation-led decarbonisation of the increasingly interconnected electricity-mobility-ICT sectors in two European countries (UK, Germany), and two countries outside Europe (China, USA).
- Impact
The outcomes of EMPOCI will benefit a range of stakeholders, including businesses, policy makers, academia and society.
The project will advance the research frontier on transformative policy mixes for low-carbon transitions; provide novel standards for assessing policy and innovation dynamics in politically contested low-carbon transition processes; and develop new strategies for accelerating sustainable energy-mobility transitions.
- Engagement
The EMPOCI team will disseminate its research findings through a variety of academic and non-academic publications, workshops and an active social media and communication strategy.
Among others, we will present our research at academic conferences, workshops and seminars throughout the duration of the project.
We will also run several encounters with experts and stakeholders to share intermediary findings and gather feedback. In addition, we will organize a set of transformative foresight workshops in the UK and Germany towards the end of the project.
Finally, we also aim to integrate our findings in various teaching activities within and beyond Sussex.
You can find our various engagement activities on EMPOCI’s ResearchGate site.
- Research outputs
Outputs from our research are made available on EMPOCI’s ResearchGate site in due course.
- Further information
EMPOCI’s international fieldwork is being facilitated through collaboration with Prof Yuan Zhou at Tsinghua University and Prof Jonas Meckling at UC Berkeley . The German case study benefits from Prof Karoline Rogge’s second affiliation with Fraunhofer ISI.
EMPOCI is funded by the European Research Council (grant agreement no. 85273) and started in June 2020. The project will run for five and a half years until November 2025.
