University of Sussex EMPOCI PhD Studentship

3.5 years PhD studentship in ERC project EMPOCI “Governing sustainable energy-mobility transitions: multi-level policy mixes, transformative capacities and low-carbon innovations”. (2021)

What you get

The PhD studentship covers a PhD stipend, a PhD fee waiver and additional benefits:

• PhD stipend: A tax-free stipend in line with the UKRI recommended minimum, annually for 3.5 years (currently £15,609). In addition, there will be an opportunity to apply for a position as research assistant within the EMPOCI project.
• PhD fee waiver: No tuition fees for 3.5 years (including UK, EU and international students).
• Additional benefits: PhD research and training related costs for 3.5 years (e.g. equipment, travel budget for fieldwork, subcontracting of surveys, interview transcriptions, summer schools, conferences, workshops, open access publications, etc.)

Type of award

Postgraduate Research Studentship

PhD project

The PhD candidate will benefit from a stimulating research environment within which EMPOCI is based:

• The Science Policy Research Unit (SPRU) is one of the most diverse science-policy departments in the world, mentoring researchers from different backgrounds to produce interdisciplinary and mixed-methods research relevant not only for theory but also for policy and practitioners.
• The Sussex Energy Group (SEG) is one of the largest social science research groups on energy policy globally which conducts world-leading interdisciplinary research on energy systems.

EMPOCI Project 

In its 1.5°C report the IPCC stressed that global efforts to promote low-carbon transitions need to be accelerated to meet the Paris Agreement. This raises a number of questions for the emerging field of policy mixes for sustainability transitions, such as on the role of actors and multi-level governance in interconnected and politically contested socio-technical transition processes. The EMPOCI project, funded by the ERC, aims at addressing these knowledge gaps through its three objectives:

1. To provide a novel conceptual and empirical understanding of the global interplay between multi-level policy mixes and low-carbon innovations in socio-technical transitions which foregrounds the role of actors and transformative capacity.

• By bridging the innovation/transition and policy studies literatures and comparatively analyzing the increasingly interconnected electricity-mobility-ICT systems in four key countries (Germany, UK, China, USA), EMPOCI will advance the research frontier on transformative policy mixes for low-carbon transitions.

2. To develop and test widely applicable novel methodological tools enabling both deep and broad insights into the drivers and barriers in unfolding multi-sectoral transition processes towards sustainability.

• Drawing on a multi-method research design EMPOCI will provide novel standards for assessing policy, agency and innovation dynamics in politically contested low-carbon transition processes (e.g. surveys, big data, foresight).

3. To co-design practically relevant multi-actor strategies for accelerating sustainable energy-mobility transitions, thereby supporting the Paris Agreement in combating climate change.

• Based on EMPOCI's findings a transformative foresight process is organized with stakeholders from business, policy, academia and society to jointly derive implications for transformative policy mixes. 

EMPOCI is a 5-year project that started on June 1, 2020 and is led by Prof Karoline Rogge. The current project team is composed of two PhD students and is seeking to take on one further PhD student. The successful PhD candidate will be expected to start at one of two PhD intakes in 2022: in January or May 2022. 

For more information please see: http://www.sussex.ac.uk/spru/research/projects/empoci

The PhD topic: Governing sustainable energy-mobility transitions in USA and California 

The EMPOCI PhD student is enrolled for a PhD in Science and Technology Policy Studies and is expected to produce a cumulative PhD thesis (based on three peer-reviewed journal articles). The PhD topic will contribute to answering the overarching research question of the EMPOCI project on how to accelerate the low-carbon transition in the increasingly interconnected energy and mobility systems on a regional and national level. For this, the PhD student will be involved - together with two further PhD students working on the UK and China - in all work packages of the EMPOCI project, with each student focussing on a different country and a pioneering region within that country (here: California). 

Conceptually, each PhD will seek to enrich the interdisciplinary field of socio-technical innovation/transition studies (Koehler et al., 2019; Zolfagharian et al., 2019) with theories, concepts, and approaches from the field of policy studies to enable a better understanding of the governance of politically contested and complex multi-sectoral sustainability transitions (Kern and Rogge, 2018; Kern et al., 2019). For this, the PhD could, for example, draw on the advocacy coalition framework (Weible et al., 2011), policy feedback theory (Pierson 1993), discourse analysis (Hajer and Versteeg, 2005) or governance network theory (Klijn and Koppenjan, 2012), but other suggestions are also very welcome (Sabatier and Weible, 2014).

The proposed interdisciplinary framework shall foreground the causal interplay between actors (business, policy, academia, society), multi-level policy mixes and low-carbon innovations (technological, organisational, business model, social, institutional and/or policy innovation), and the role of transformative capacity and exogenous conditions for the unfolding co-evolutionary transition processes (Wolfram, 2016; Edmondson et al., 2019). By adopting a socio-political transitions perspective the PhD will recognize the existence of barriers arising from lock-in, vested interests and resistance to change, and will pay dedicated attention to the politics and power involved in transition processes (Geels, 2014; Stirling, 2014; Smink et al., 2015). This implies that acceleration not only calls for the coordination of efforts on different governance levels (e.g. national vs regional) and policy fields (climate vs industrial policy), but also for implementing policy mixes for creative destruction (Kivimaa and Kern, 2016; Rogge and Reichardt, 2016). 

Empirically, the PhD student will focus on conducting the country/region case study in the USA in general and California in particular, combining qualitative multi-actor case studies and quantitative survey analysis.

The PhD topic shall follow EMPOCI in acknowledging that deep decarbonization requires simultaneous low-carbon transitions in multiple sectors (Geels et al., 2017; Schot and Kanger, 2018), such as across the electricity-mobility-ICT systems, reflecting trends in electrification, digitization and decentralisation (Canzler et al., 2017; Di Silvestre et al., 2018). PhD proposals can assume a broad perspective on energy-mobility transitions, but are also welcome to suggest key area(s) for in-depth investigation, such as electricity storage/grid innovation or novel ICT/digitalization solutions at the interface of energy-mobility systems. In addition, PhD topics can give an equal weight on studying business, policy, academia and society as relevant actor groups, but may also suggest conducting in-depth investigations on particular actor group(s), such as media, trade unions or NGOs.

Data will be collected through desktop analysis, semi-structured interviews in multi-actor case studies and multi-actor survey analysis (the latter supported through a data collection sub-contract in the country/region in question) and includes one year of empirical fieldwork in the US, at the project's partner institution UC Berkeley. In particular, the qualitative case studies shall seek to investigate which role actors and their networks play for the interplay between policy mixes and low-carbon inno­vations, and how this is influenced by transformative capacity and exogenous conditions. In contrast, the quantitative survey analysis shall aim at investigating to what extent multi-level policy mixes explain the innovation activities of actors involved in multi-sectoral transition processes, and vice versa, and what is the role of transformative capacity for this interplay. The PhD topic may also propose to draw on big data analytics (e.g. social media analysis) and other novel methods (particularly from the field of policy studies) – thereby potentially enhancing our understanding of the interplay between policy mixes and socio-technical change. This could, for example, be applied to the mapping of advocacy coalitions and their influence on policy mix change, or for generating novel indicators for capturing the unfolding system transition or policy mix characteristics. 

PhD supervisors 

Students interested in this topic will be supervised by Karoline Rogge. Following standard SPRU practise, a second supervisor will complement the supervisory team, and applicants are welcome to indicate their preferred choice of co-supervisor. 

Further Information on the School / Department

The University of Sussex Business School

The University of Sussex Business School was formed in 2009 and comprises the Department of Accounting and Finance, the Department of Strategy and Marketing, the Department of Management, the Department of Economics and the Science Policy Research Unit (SPRU). With a new home in the Jubilee Building, a state-of-the-art academic building at the heart of the campus, the Business School is a vibrant, ambitious and dynamic School with a strong research focus.

SPRU (Science Policy Research Unit)

Founded in 1966 by Christopher Freeman, SPRU was one of the first interdisciplinary research centres in the field of science and technology policy and management. Today, with over 60 faculty members, SPRU remains at the forefront of new ideas, problem-orientated research, inspiring teaching, and creative, high impact engagement with decision makers across government, business and civil society. Our research addresses pressing global policy agendas, including innovation challenges posed by the digital economy, the future of industrial policy, inclusive economic growth, the politics of scientific expertise, energy policy, security issues, entrepreneurship, and pathways to a more sustainable future.

SPRU researchers are driven by a desire to tackle real-world questions, whilst also contributing to a deeper theoretical understanding of how science, technology and innovation is shaping today’s world. A 2012 study published in the journal 'Research Policy' ranked SPRU second only to Harvard University in terms of its research impact in innovation studies.

With a community of over 140 MSc and doctoral students from all over the world, SPRU is also well known for its high quality, research-led teaching programmes. 

The Sussex Energy Group (SEG)

The Sussex Energy Group (SEG) aims to understand and foster transitions towards sustainable, low carbon energy systems. Drawing from SPRU’s tradition, researchers in the Sussex Energy Group undertake academically rigorous, interdisciplinary and world-leading research that is relevant to contemporary policy challenges. SEG also educates the next generation of energy policy professionals through our MSc and PhD programmes.

SEG’s research interests are in the prospects for a more sustainable energy future. The group's expertise covers a wide range of areas, including energy innovation and transitions, economics and finance, energy justice, energy demand and behaviour, smart infrastructure, and energy supply technologies.

Brighton, September 28, 2021

References

Canzler, W., Engels, F., Rogge, J.-C., Simon, D., Wentland, A., 2017. From “living lab” to strategic action field: Bringing together energy, mobility, and Information Technology in Germany. Energy Research & Social Science 27, 25–35. 10.1016/j.erss.2017.02.003.

Di Silvestre, M.L., Favuzza, S., Riva Sanseverino, E., Zizzo, G., 2018. How Decarbonization, Digitalization and Decentralization are changing key power infrastructures. Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews 93 (June), 483–498. 10.1016/j.rser.2018.05.068.

Edmondson, D.L., Kern, F., Rogge, K.S., 2019. The co-evolution of policy mixes and socio-technical systems: Towards a conceptual framework of policy mix feedback in sustainability transitions. Research Policy, 103555. 10.1016/j.respol.2018.03.010.

Geels, F.W., 2014. Regime Resistance against Low-Carbon Transitions: Introducing Politics and Power into the Multi-Level Perspective. Theory, Culture & Society 31 (5), 21–40. 10.1177/0263276414531627.

Geels, F.W., Sovacool, B.K., Schwanen, T., Sorrell, S., 2017. Sociotechnical transitions for deep decarbonization. Science (New York, N.Y.) 357 (6357), 1242–1244. 10.1126/science.aao3760.

Hajer, M., Versteeg, W., 2005. A decade of discourse analysis of environmental politics: Achievements, challenges, perspectives. Journal of Environmental Policy & Planning 7 (3), 175–184. 10.1080/15239080500339646.

Kern, F., Rogge, K.S., 2018. Harnessing theories of the policy process for analysing the politics of sustainability transitions: A critical survey. Environmental Innovation and Societal Transitions 27, 102–117. 10.1016/j.eist.2017.11.001.

Kern, F., Rogge, K.S., Howlett, M., 2019. Policy mixes for sustainability transitions: New approaches and insights through bridging innovation and policy studies. Research Policy, 103832. 10.1016/j.respol.2019.103832.

Kivimaa, P., Kern, F., 2016. Creative destruction or mere niche support?: Innovation policy mixes for sustainability transitions. Research Policy 45 (1), 205–217. 10.1016/j.respol.2015.09.008.

Klijn, E.-H., Koppenjan, J., 2012. Governance network theory: Past, present and future. Policy & Politics 40 (4), 587–606. 10.1332/030557312X655431.

Köhler, J., Geels, F.W., Kern, F., Markard, J., Wieczorek, A., Alkemade, F., Avelino, F., Bergek, A., Boons, F., Fünfschilling, L., Hess, D., Holtz, G., Hyysalo, S., Jenkins, K., Kivimaa, P., Martiskainen, M., McMeekin, A., Mühlemeier, M.S., Nykvist, B., Onsongo, E., Pel, B., Raven, R., Rohracher, H., Sandén, B., Schot, J., Sovacool, B., Turnheim, B., Welch, D., Wells, P., 2019. An agenda for sustainability transitions research: State of the art and future directions. Environmental Innovation and Societal Transitions 31, 1–32. 10.1016/j.eist.2019.01.004.

Pierson, P., 1993. Policy feedback and policy change. World Polit. 45 (4), 595–628.

Rogge, K.S., Reichardt, K., 2016. Policy mixes for sustainability transitions: An extended concept and framework for analysis. Research Policy 45 (8), 1620–1635. 10.1016/j.respol.2016.04.004.

Sabatier, P.A., Weible, C.M., 2014. Theories of the policy process, 3rd ed. Westview Press, Boulder, CO.

Schot, J., Kanger, L., 2018. Deep transitions: Emergence, acceleration, stabilization and directionality. Research Policy 47 (6), 1045–1059. 10.1016/j.respol.2018.03.009.

Smink, M.M., Hekkert, M.P., Negro, S.O., 2015. Keeping sustainable innovation on a leash? Exploring incumbents’ institutional strategies. Bus. Strat. Env. 24 (2), 86–101. 10.1002/bse.1808.

Stirling, A., 2014. Transforming power: Social science and the politics of energy choices. Energy Research & Social Science 1, 83–95. 10.1016/j.erss.2014.02.001.

Weible, C.M., Sabatier, P.A., Jenkins-Smith, H.C., Nohrstedt, D., Henry, A.D., deLeon, P., 2011. A quarter century of the advocacy coalition framework: An introduction to the special issue. Policy Studies Journal 39 (3), 349–360. 10.1111/j.1541-0072.2011.00412.x.

Wolfram, M., 2016. Conceptualizing urban transformative capacity: A framework for research and policy. Cities 51, 121–130. 10.1016/j.cities.2015.11.011.

Zolfagharian, M., Walrave, B., Raven, R., Romme, A.G.L., 2019. Studying transitions: Past, present, and future. Research Policy 48, 103788. 10.1016/j.respol.2019.04.012.

Eligibility

Essential requirements 

We are seeking a PhD candidate with an interest in the governance of low-carbon socio-technical transitions in the energy-mobility systems in the  US meeting the following requirements:

• MSc degree: A very good Master’s degree in the social sciences (e.g. in innovation/transition studies, policy/governance studies, political science, and related fields).
• Bachelor’s degree: A good Bachelor’s degree in any discipline(s), but preferably with relevance for studying sustainable energy-mobility transitions.
• Methods skills: Prior experience with qualitative or quantitative research methods.
• Language skills: Fluency in oral and written English.

Desirable skills and experience 

• Country expertise on policies and policy making processes for energy-mobility transitions in the US (incl. through work experience). Regional expertise on California is a plus.
• Sectoral expertise in the electricity-mobility-ICT systems (e.g. through work experience).
• Prior studies or research in interdisciplinary innovation/transition studies, or related fields.
• Prior studies or research on the politics of transitions, theories of the policy process, multi-level governance, policy mixes for sustainability transitions, policy evaluation, or related fields.
• Methodological expertise in case studies of organisations and/or survey design and analysis (incl. use of software tools such as NVivo, MaxQDA, SPSS, STATA)
• Skills in data analytics/science for the social sciences are an additional plus, such as knowledge of programming language(s) (e.g. Python, R), experience in solving modelling problems using AI/ML approaches, or working with NLP libraries (e.g. SpaCy, NLTK, Gensim, Hugging Face). 

Number of scholarships available

One.

Deadline

How to apply

Enquiries and applications to: k.rogge@sussex.ac.uk by October 26, 2021 (end of day) with:

1. Basic information (compiled in one pdf-document):

• A letter of motivation (max. 1 page, incl. relevant prior experience and starting date)
• Your CV (including courses taken and grades obtained, max. 2 pages)

2. Your PhD research proposal on governing energy-mobility transitions in the US and California (pdf, 2,000 words, incl. bibliography – but shorter proposals will also be considered).

3. Your MSc thesis as pdf-document (or if not yet available a recent seminar paper on a topic closely related to the PhD, in English).

4. A reference letter emailed directly to Prof Rogge (e.g. from your MSc thesis supervisor, or your current/previous employer) with subject line “EMPOCI PhD: Reference for YOURNAME”.

We welcome applications from suitably qualified people, regardless of ethnicity, age, disability, gender, sexual orientation, and working patterns.

Contact us

For questions relating to the studentship please contact Prof Karoline Rogge: k.rogge@sussex.ac.uk 

For questions relating to the PhD programme, please contact the PhD Course Convenor Prof Tim Foxon: T.J.Foxon@sussex.ac.uk

For practical questions about applications, please contact the Business School Research Student Support Team: business-researchstudents@sussex.ac.uk

Timetable

• Application deadline for PhD studentship: October 26, 2021 (via email to k.rogge@sussex.ac.uk)
• Anticipated interview period: First half of November, 2021 (virtual interview), plus potentially another in second half of November 2021
• Application to SPRU  PhD programme (only  for candidate selected for the PhD studentship): submission of PhD course  application to the University’s online application system in November 2021 (see  https://www.sussex.ac.uk/study/phd/apply) 
• Expected offers, conditional on departmental clearance: expected for early  December 2021
• PhD start: successful PhD candidates are expected to start as early as possible in 2022 (January or May intake).