Escaping and creating lock-ins in accelerating low-carbon transitions: conceptual reflections and empirical insights from electricity and auto-mobility transitions in Europe, the USA and China

Abstract While escaping the lock-ins of existing systems is essential for accelerated low-carbon transitions, the paper argues that acceleration also requires creating new lock-ins of emerging niche innovations which need to be stabilised before widespread diffusion. The paper makes three conceptual contributions to the lock-in literature: it distinguishes and assesses three specific debates (on locked-in entities, determinism and agency and unlocking), it mobilises insights from multiple social sciences regarding these debates and it identifies interactions between the debates and integrates relevant insights in the multi-level perspective. The paper confronts and illustrates these contributions with empirical analysis of accelerating low-carbon transitions in electricity and auto-mobility systems in Europe, the USA and China. It finds that low-carbon niche innovations became locked-in to dominant designs before widespread diffusion, that accelerated diffusion involved techno-economic and agentic drivers, and that existing systems were unlocked more by niche innovations and regime destabilisation than by external landscape pressures.