Innovation and institutional change: the transition to a sustainable ...

Chapter 8
Conclusions
8.1 Introduction
The main purpose of this thesis is to gain understanding in the way the
interaction between technological and institutional changes may offset
processes towards systems change, and the way these processes may be
directed towards sustainability. The preceding chapters evaluated change
processes within the electricity system in the past thirty years and explored
potential transition paths. This chapter presents the main conclusions.
After discussing several relevant theoretical perspectives in chapter two a
conceptual framework was developed in chapter three that centres around
the idea that the sociotechnical system for electricity provision and use, and
its institutional arrangements (modes of production, coordination, and
provision), is embedded in four broader institutional arrangements that
coordinate:
– the way knowledge is generated, directed, distributed and used;
– the way the system is regulated and legitimated in a political sense;
– the way the system serves its function in the economic system; and,
– the way the system provides a societal function and maintains its
legitimacy.
Chapter four showed that initial practices in the emerging electricity system
at the end of the nineteenth century were rather divergent in terms of
technological and organisational forms. A particular practice based on
Edison’s central station model gained dominance as a network of actors was
successful in propagating their interpretation of the electricity system and
structuring the configurations of broader institutional arrangements that were
emerging according to this interpretation, with the acceptance of the central
station model and the principle of natural monopoly as central elements. In
theoretical terms this process was characterised as institutionalisation, with
gaining and maintaining legitimacy as a principal mechanism in the process.
It was asserted that dominant practices organised in sociotechnical systems
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