Dear Colleagues,

The Paris Agreement confirms the dawn of a new stage in global efforts regarding climate change. Formal, international agreement now acknowledges that only rapid and deep socio-technical transition without precedent has any hope of achieving the 1.5 °C target. Meanwhile actual trends across almost all relevant metrics at global scale continue to show growth or, at best, stabilization. The importance and urgency of low-carbon innovation thus appears as intense as it has ever been. The usual response, amongst research and policy alike, is thus to redouble efforts to understand and support low-carbon innovations that promise these profound reductions in GHG emissions. There is little evidence, however, that this top-down, managerial approach will be able to deliver reductions going forward that it has failed to achieve thus far. Skepticism seems even more warranted once one factors in the broader set of deepening and unforeseen global disruptions, beyond climate change, in which context such planned or managed transition must take place, but which is often curiously absent in discussions even of low-carbon ‘system’ transition. This would include geopolitical turbulence, with a still–dominant global North in disarray and rising non-Western powers, especially China; the disruption of emerging digital and ‘post-human’ technologies; profound socio-cultural changes and polarizations concerning issues of generation, gender and sexuality, ethnicity and cosmopolitization; and deepening (intra-national) socio-economic inequality. In such circumstances, the systemic complexity of actual socio-political forces at play affecting low-carbon innovation promises only to become increasingly overwhelming.

This Special Issue thus aims to explore a different approach. This asks primarily not how, and which, low-carbon innovations (and policies thereof) can themselves directly deliver the smooth passage to the deep transition needed. Rather it starts by acknowledging that systemic disruption, and across multiple dimensions, is taking place anyway. From here the question instead becomes how and which low-carbon innovations are best enabled and propelled by this turbulent context; and how they may then, in turn, be used to shape, harness and/or channel the system-level change towards ethically and politically preferable futures. Accordingly, we invite contributions that explore diverse case studies, from across the world, that strategically illuminate the emerging parallel co-production of specific, concrete developments and system-level change, so as to enable working with, rather than seeking to contain, the irreducible uncertainty and complexity of deep system transition. Papers that use inter- or trans-disciplinary approaches to research the conjunction of low-carbon innovation and adjacent, but often neglected, sites of dynamic activity—such as digital innovation, urban governance and initiatives, or cultural, heritage and religious movements—are particularly welcome.

Dr. David Tyfield
Guest Editor

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• Low-carbon innovation
• deep system transition
• digital revolution
• geopolitical disruption
• complex systems
• rise of China
• cultural change
• power relations