Thematic Article
Mission Led government or Radical Incrementalism for electricity and Net Zero?
steve.hall@york.ac.uk
Abstract
Should we govern the energy transition through bold ‘Mission Led’ government or pragmatic ‘Radical Incrementalism’? A Mission Led approach has an emboldened state setting clear goals for transformational change. Radical Incrementalism calls for pragmatic interventions that can be implemented quickly and benefit millions. Here we explore how the UK government’s commitment to Mission Led government applies to domestic and local energy and energy regulation. We expose our collective ignorance about whether the current energy transition is fair, and describe how Net Zero policy risks making inequality worse. We argue that both Radical Incrementalism and Mission Led government could improve fairness and distributional outcomes from Net Zero, by adopting a ‘relational’ as opposed to ‘rational’ view of domestic energy consumers. This article is published in the thematic collection ‘The critical role of governance for decarbonisation at pace: learning the lessons from SHAPE research’, edited by Sarah Birch, Hilary Graham, Andrew Jordan, Tim O’Riordan, Henry Richards.
Keywords
Net Zerolocal energyrelational economic sociologyenergy justiceenergy regulationclimate policyCopyright statement
© The author(s) 2025. This is an open access article licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 International LicenseCite this article
Hall, S., Owen, A., Middlemiss, L., Davis, M. & Bookbinder, R. (2025), ‘Mission Led government or Radical Incrementalism for electricity and Net Zero?’, Journal of the British Academy, 13(1): a10 https://doi.org/10.5871/jba/013.a10crossref
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