Why don’t governments pay more attention to energy demand? Investigating systemic reasons for the supply/ demand asymmetry in energy policy

Yekatherina Bobrova¹, Nick Eyre¹, Tina Fawcett¹, Colin Nolden^1,2 and George Papachristos³

¹University of Oxford, UK, ²University of Bristol, UK, ³TU Eindhoven, Netherlands

The UK government has detailed plans to decarbonise energy supply, but comprehensive plans to reduce energy demand are missing. This is despite evidence that substantial energy demand reduction is a significant enabler of a cost effective, timely and de-risked transition to net-zero, associated with numerous societal co-benefits that could improve quality of life, e.g. improved air quality and warmer homes. The persistent nature of asymmetry in demand/supply energy policy indicates that it is a systemic problem, similar in nature to problems encountered in many socio-technical systems, e.g. asymmetry in healthcare between curing illnesses and investing in preventive healthcare. Systems research is built on the premise that even though the systems themselves and their elements might be different, the interconnection of the elements in different systems might be similar enough to make transferable insights possible. The interconnection of system elements constitutes the systems structure, and this paper suggests that the observed supply/demand policy asymmetries in different systems can partly be explained by similarities in their structures. There is no existing systemic explanation of the asymmetry in energy policy domain, however, corresponding systemic explanations in other domains may be transferable by analogy.

This paper expands a meta-narrative systematic literature review method to derive structural explanations from research in 14 different domains, including healthcare, waste management and transportation planning. A meta-narrative review is a qualitative type of systematic review, which looks at how particular research questions, methods used to answer them, and concepts utilised to understand them have been shaped over time. Reasoning by analogy is a combination of inductive and abductive reasoning, which is used to transfer insights from the source domain to the target domain. The following steps are used in this paper. First, process narratives are developed on how research on policy asymmetry unfolded in specific domains. Second, the narratives are coded along three ontological dimensions of socio-technical systems (actors, materiality and rules) and corresponding interactions between these dimensions. Emerging themes are visualised through cross-tabulation and diagrams. These insights are discussed by the research team and additional feedback on emerging insights is sought from experts in the field. These steps are designed to assist the identification of structural explanations for policy asymmetries in a systematic fashion.

Results indicate that there are indeed structural explanations for the persistent nature of demand/ supply energy policy asymmetry, which go beyond ambitions of particular individuals (e.g. an idea that politicians like cutting ribbons in front of power plants, whereas one cannot cut a ribbon in front of a successful retrofit programme of thousands of dwellings). The review also confirms that it is possible to learn by analogy from different research domains. Preliminary results on common systemic mechanisms for supply/demand policy asymmetries in different domains include:

• Hierarchies of solution strategies: This set of insights highlight a continuum rather than a duality (supply vs demand) of solutions strategies, and their hierarchical nature underpinned by nested system capabilities.
• Actor agency within the system: This set of insights focuses on the role of actor agency within the system, and the system’s role to nurture actor capabilities.
• Increasing system size: This set of insights outline a systemic tendency for a fixed utilisation target to make certain systems grow in size.
• System aim (productivity vs resilience): This set of insights show how demand/supply policy asymmetry can result from managing exclusively for system productivity without building capacity for system resilience.

These insights form a strong conceptual basis for further inquiry into mechanisms of supply/demand policy asymmetry in individual domains, e.g. in energy policy.