This project in the Studies of Policy, Science, Engineering and Technology component of the Science and Society Program will compare policies for promoting renewable energy in the United States with those of Germany in order to understand the institutional and contextual factors, with an emphasis on the technical ideas and normative values embedded in those institutions, that lead to the adoption of successful policies. Such an understanding will inform more sophisticated recommendations for transnational learning. This is an opportune time to study such policies. Consumers and industries are rapidly adopting renewable energy technologies, resulting in annual double-digit growth rates for the renewable energy industry in many countries. However, international comparisons show more rapid adoption in a number of European countries than in the United States. For example, from 1990 to 2001, installed wind capacity in the United States grew from 1,911 MW to 4,062 MW. Over the same period, installed capacity in Germany expanded from 48 MW to 8,712 MW. We contend that different public policies have led to these different outcomes. We will utilize the theoretical frameworks of historical institutionalism, institutional learning, and social studies of technology to develop a nuanced account of the institutional and political contextual factors, paying particularly close attention to the role of technical ideas and normative values, and the tight linkages between them, that influence the attempts of these countries to promote renewable energy. This analysis will emphasize institutional structures, the institutionalization of new ideas as a source of policy change, the contested and negotiated nature of the legitimate sources of policy ideas and technical analysis, and the ways different political contexts come to closure on such issues, what one scholar has termed civic epistemology. In doing so, we will deepen and enrich both the institutionalist and STS frameworks. Those bodies of theory pay little attention to each other and their synthesis could benefit both. In addition, we will provide a nuanced account of a substantively important comparative policy issue. We plan to recommend policy changes for both countries, based on a context-sensitive analysis of the development and operation of such policies. Better policies will lead to more rapid and sustainable expansion of renewable energy technologies. Many scholars have pointed out the difficulties of transnational lesson-drawing. By paying close attention to institutional as well as technological contexts, our analysis should overcome those difficulties.
