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

Conclusions 223
The analysis of the various paths taken in the electricity system has
explicitly pointed out institutional factors as the dominant explanation for
success and failure. The nature of interaction between government actors,
knowledge actors and the electricity sector has had a strong imprint on the
type of approaches and the extent of learning. In this way this confirms the
NSI approach and its conceptualisation of interaction and learning. Our
analysis showed certain patterns of failure repeating, indicating that the
institutional set-up is not geared towards a proper development and
implementation of technology. While the NSI approach suggests that certain
national path dependencies have build up, our analysis indicates that this is
only part of the picture, and that also the evolution of a certain system of
production and consumption, with its established modes of coordination,
production and provision, leaves its imprint on the nature of this set-up.
Moreover, the analysis of paths taken in the electricity system suggests how
a variety of institutional arrangements influenced these paths, and in some
cases co-evolved with them. In some cases, national institutional
arrangements played a central role (e.g. shift to gas, and the nuclear path), in
other cases it was the interplay between societal change, policy change, and
changes in industrial and electricity sectors (e.g. decentral cogeneration).
The picture is thus much more diffuse that the NSI approach suggests.
Multi-level transition theory
The focus of transition theory is on the way shifts of and transformation in
sociotechnical systems may come about. A conceptual framework is
developed based on three levels, landscape, regime and niche, and the way
change processes at these three levels link up (see also chapters two and
seven). The regime-level is where production and consumption systems are
located, in socio-technical configuration held together by a set of semicoherent
rules that guides actors (Rip and Kemp, 1998).
Overall, the conceptualisation of systems change through the interplay of
changes at multiple levels holds for all cases. The role of the regime in
channelling the type of novelties that may break through has also shown
relevant in the cases. For example, the necessity of connecting to the grid
and its underlying rules has impacted development of small-scale renewable
options. In this context, Rip and Groen (2001) argued that the grid functions
as a sociotechnical buffer layer, an obligatory passage for novelties in
electricity generation. Nevertheless, the role and function of the grid also coevolves
with changing patterns of electricity use and generation, as in the
case of decentral cogeneration, and can shift from a constraining to an
enabling factor as the architecture develops an orientation on regional and
local exchange (Kling, 2002).