EAEPE

REPE International Advisory Board - Best paper prize committee September 2021

This year the committee had four issues to consider i.e., Vol 1 n°1,2,3 and Vol2 n° 1. The editorial to the inaugural issue of the Review of Evolutionary Political Economy provided the committee with a clear and comprehensive assessment of the objectives of the review for which the authors S. Cincotti, W. Elsner, N. Lazaric , A. Nevesvetailova and E. Stockhammer should be thanked. These objectives are numerous, embracing constructive debates among different “heterodox” economic schools of thought, transdisciplinarity, historical references,  and concerns for major world issues. The content of the first two issues, of Volume 1, give a good idea of this variety with contributions from leading scholars of different schools. Another side of the policy of REPE is to favour special issues as they offer a specific context in which different approaches can interact as it is indeed the case with the third and fourth issues under view.

The committee had thus a complex task and many papers could have been rightly selected given the nexus of objectives that we all agreed on. At a time when the 2021 IPCC report strongly stresses how the world must change for humanity to address the environmental change already evident, the committee slightly favoured papers addressing directly this expected significant transformation. The tight competition between the papers with similar focus on the major changes to come, led the committee, faced with the need to select only one paper for the prize, to recommend the contribution of Stephen S. Bettin:  Electricity Infrastructures and innovation in the next phase of energy transition –amendments to the technology innovation system framework (Volume 1, n°3).     In their introduction the organizers of this special issue (Vol1,n°3) rightly spoke of a “planetary carambolage”, setting the tone of the issue and mentioning a corridor of manoeuvring out of the ecological crisis, assessing that Bettin’s paper was discussing the realm of energy transitions from the perspective of electricity infrastructures for renewable energies. Such change in infrastructures requires flexible solutions.  Hence Bettin stresses that a more evolutionary innovation system is called for, transforming the current energy system to a multilevel perspective, in order to provide niches for radical changes to prosper.

Clearly these “planetary carambolage” issues are going to motivate many debates and contributions among the REPE tribes, which are by all means in much better positions to address them than the economic orthodoxy.