Evidence map: topics, trends, and policy in the energy transitions literature

Abstract

We develop an evidence map of the academic research on energy transitions (ETs) with a focus on what that literature says about public policy for addressing climate change. In this article, the questions we ask are: What trends do we see in the topics that occur in journal articles on the energy transition? And to what extent has public policy been a focus? Where do we need or see energy transitions happening? Our approach involves: (1) using two literature databases to identify 4875 relevant ET articles over the period 1970–2018; (2) identifying important topics within ET using topic modeling via latent Dirichlet allocation on the abstracts of the articles; and (3) conducting a robustness check on the topics and analysis on the policy-relevant topics. This study contributes to the ETs research by providing the first systematic overview of peer-reviewed articles on ETs. We find that the number of academic articles covering ETs has increased by nearly a factor of 50 since 2008, 67% of them are policy related. Research on governance is pervasive in the literature and contains multiple topics differentiated by substantive foci. Some topics on the social-technical, social-behavioral, and political aspects of transition governance are becoming increasingly popular. Network analysis shows transition governance, energy economics and climate implications, and energy technologies comprise the three largest clusters of topics, but we observe a lack of connectedness between governance topics and technology topics. In the policy-relevant literature, we see a growing number of articles on technological and institutional innovation, and examples from leader countries, especially in Europe. We find only a quarter of articles discussed ETs in developing countries, which is not aligned with a recurring theme, their importance to the global ET.

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