Job description
Do you have a social science background and are you passionate about making society more sustainable? Do you want to better understand how different socio-technical systems like electricity, heating, and mobility interact—and how they can be transformed to support sustainability?
We are offering a fully funded PhD (4y, 1fte) position, in which you can provide a meaningful contribution to real-world sustainability transitions.
Information
Creating a more sustainable future requires deep, society-wide changes that go beyond improving or implementing individual technologies. Rather, it requires changes in practices, regulations, technologies, infrastructures, markets, user preferences, and culture, not only within but also beyond the boundaries of individual socio-technical systems such as housing, electricity, heating, food, and mobility. However, both academic research and policy efforts often concentrate on improving sustainability in single socio-technical systems. This siloed research approach can lead to a narrow understanding of transition processes that favours bottom-up forces for change within single socio-technical systems, while largely neglecting how interactions between systems could be drivers or barriers for transformative change. In line with this research bias, policy efforts have mostly been aiming at transforming single systems, resulting in misalignments and tensions in ongoing transitions. Examples are increasing grid congestion and high costs associated with district heating in the Netherlands compared to their more integrated counterparts in Denmark.
In this PhD research you will adopt a multi-system perspective to investigate misalignments and tensions that result from treating heat, electricity, and mobility transitions as separate policy domains and explore how changes can be realized in a more integral way, beyond boundaries of single systems.
Theoretically, you will build on, and contribute to, the interdisciplinary field of Sustainability Transitions. For instance, you could build on theory on multi-system and regime interactions, sector coupling, and/or governance of local energy transitions.
Empirically, you will adopt a qualitative multiple case study approach in which you investigate ongoing local energy transitions led by energy communities and/or municipalities, that transcend boundaries of single socio-technical systems. This could involve (a combination of) innovations such as distributed renewable energy generation, smart grid systems, seasonal storage (heat), local energy trading, sustainable heating solutions, and shared electric mobility. Related research projects (e.g. ACCU, SmartCore, EmPowerED) provide direct access to interesting case studies in which you can closely engage with municipalities and/or energy communities. You will gather data through qualitative research methods such as semi-structured interviews, surveys, focus groups, and/or participant observation.