It is widely acknowledged that strategies to decarbonize energy systems cannot omit the mobility sector. For several decades, particularly in urban areas, a shift from car-based mobility to more environmental-friendly modes has been high on political agendas. Progress has been made in many urban areas, but so far only in small, rather incremental steps. The dominance of the car has remained largely stable in urban transport. For some time now, many experts have argued that processes of digitalization will co-evolve with societal trends and lead to multimodal urban mobility regimes in which private car usage will lose its dominance. In this paper, we examine if stakeholders active in the field believe that, despite digitalization, policy interventions are essential to achieve such a transition. The analysis draws on concepts from transition research and is based on 10 semi-structured interviews with providers of innovative mobility services that may contribute to more multimodal urban mobility systems. Geographical focus is on the City of Stuttgart (Germany). Results indicate broad agreement amongst the interviewees that digitalization alone is not sufficient for achieving a full-scale transition towards multimodal urban mobility. Policy measures that restrict car-based mobility would also be needed. However, many of the interviewed actors doubt that the essential policy mixes will find the necessary political and societal acceptance. Finally, the paper indicates ways to overcome this dilemma.

This paper explores how the Capability Approach (CA) can enrich the concept of energy justice by assessing the impact of two cases of digitalisation in the energy sector. Digitalisation promises technical solutions to pressing challenges in the energy sector such as climate change and fossil fuel scarcity. Current academic and popular discussions of these solutions are dominated by a techno-utopian ideal, which sometimes obscures complex ethical and social challenges. Furthermore, technology assessment in the energy sector often focuses on environmental and economic aspects of sustainability, while issues of energy justice or broader ethical concerns are often a low priority. In this paper, we explore whether Nussbaum’s version of the CA can be used as a systematic approach to the assessment of technological options that helps bring energy justice into the spotlight. Drawing on examples from two different areas of the energy system, namely, smart grids for the electricity sector and autonomous vehicles for the mobility sector, we demonstrate that the CA provides a normative framework that allows for aspects of individual deliberation and as such is well suited as a normative metric for the conception of energy justice in social science.

In the transport sector, where change comes with inertia and investments are made with a long term perspective, decision makers need to consider how the future may look like in the very long term. The work presented in this paper is a scenario analysis focusing on the evolution of transport demand towards 2050, aiming to identify related challenges for European industrial and policy players. It follows up on the work of other recent attempts to study the future of transport from a European perspective, integrating findings from these studies, updating new trends and applying a specific scenario analysis methodology relying also on expert consultation. The diversity of the scenarios created unfolds aspects of the future transport system with rather different outcomes on issues like the volume of transport, travel motives, the prevalent spatial scales of transport and logistics, people’s preferences towards different transport attributes, the relevancy of the State versus the private initiative in transport production, the level of competition, or the relative importance of environment and resource scarcity in setting an agenda for innovation and regulations. Beyond the subsequent challenges and opportunities identified in this work, the scenarios developed may be a useful basis for individual actors of distinct backgrounds to build their own specific futures, supporting them in defining strategies for the future.