Addressing the climate crisis necessitates accelerating transitions towards climate-neutral systems of production and consumption, with electrification emerging as a crucial decarbonisation strategy. The acceleration of such net-zero transitions across multiple systems faces significant resistance and contestation. In this paper, we propose an extended list of challenges unique to the acceleration phase of socio-technical transitions: we introduce ‘expansion and contestation’, ‘justice’, and ‘international dynamics’ as additional challenge types to complement the already acknowledged challenge types of ‘whole systems change’, ‘interaction between multiple systems’, ‘decline and resistance’, ‘consumers and social practices’, and ‘governance’. We apply this extended analytical framework to the electrification of private-passenger vehicles and investigate the unfolding transition to e-mobility with evidence from 35 expert interviews in Germany and California. We uncover over 50 real-world challenges associated with these net-zero transitions at the beginning of the acceleration phase. Most challenges fall within the categories of ‘expansion and contestation’ and ‘governance’. While Germany and California share many real-world challenges, we also find significant variation between both jurisdictions, which we attribute to differences in their automotive incumbency, transition governance approaches, and institutional contexts. We discuss implications for future research, arguing for greater attention to the dual politics of acceleration during net-zero transitions: political conflict not only centres around the decline of old industries and future losses, but also around the expansion of the new system and associated future gains.

中文翻译：

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加速净零转型的挑战：德国和加州交通电气化的见解

解决气候危机需要加速向气候中和的生产和消费系统转型，其中电气化成为一项重要的脱碳战略。跨多个系统的这种净零转型的加速面临着巨大的阻力和争议。在本文中，我们提出了社会技术转型加速阶段特有的一系列挑战：我们引入了“扩张和争论”、“正义”和“国际动态”作为额外的挑战类型，以补充已经公认的挑战类型“整个系统的变化”、“多个系统之间的相互作用”、“衰落与抵抗”、“消费者与社会实践”和“治理”。我们将这一扩展的分析框架应用于私人乘用车的电气化，并利用来自德国和加利福尼亚州 35 名专家访谈的证据，调查了向电动汽车的转变。我们在加速阶段开始时发现了 50 多个与这些净零转型相关的现实挑战。大多数挑战属于“扩张和竞争”以及“治理”类别。虽然德国和加利福尼亚州面临着许多现实世界的挑战，但我们也发现两个司法管辖区之间存在显着差异，我们将其归因于其汽车行业、转型治理方法和制度背景的差异。我们讨论了对未来研究的影响，主张更多地关注净零转型期间加速的双重政治：政治冲突不仅围绕旧产业的衰落和未来损失，而且还围绕新体系的扩张和相关未来收益。