Presentation
My long-standing interest in innovation has been driven by a question of ‘how agency and novelty of ideas, concerns and technologies co-produce and stabilize their existence in dynamic sociotechnical agencements’. My perspectives have been STS and Science, Technology and Innovation. I have jointly with prof Raghu Garud coined the term path creation in opposition to path dependency thinking, where path creation allow agency to have their own temporalities to guide the actions.
My work on wind power and clean tech innovations (with Liliana Doganova) address both novelty in technical innovations as well as how qualifications through economic and non-economic valuations of such innovations stems from identifying and making harmful environmental or climate effects valuable in market arrangements.
During my stay at CSI I will be working on two papers:
Paper I: “From ‘saving the small open economy’ to ‘green growth nation building’:
The vernaculars of value in Danish energy governance turning things into energy assets (1972-2022)”
This research is related to the research project:
Green transition through dynamics of problematizations:
How forms of expertise influence the financial and social valuation of energy resources in Denmark
I am leading this project of an involving 12 researchers from AAU, CBS, and Danish Technical University. We use methods and concepts taken from research at the intersection of STS and economic sociology, and the field of valuation studies. (see link below) We have studied and compared fossil and non-fossil energy resources in Denmark using historical and ethnographic methods, and will be one of the first studies that study the governance involved in ‘making and un-making’ of these resources.
We have called for a conference in October 2024 in Copenhagen on Social studies of energy and the making and unmaking of energy resources.
Paper 2: Models and argumentations: ‘Systematic conservatism’ in climate policy advice from Danish Economic Council (2000-2020)
This work is done in collaboration with Troels Krarup, associate professor, AAU.
Macroeconomic expertise and models institutionalized in official councils have long offered policy advise on questions of market regulation, taxation, and public expenditure. More recently, such councils have also developed apparatuses for generating policy advice on the decarbonization of our economies. Existing literature has identified notable economists as climate sceptics and exposed the severe trivialization, for example, of so-called global cost of carbon studies. However, mainstream economists today generally fully acknowledge the potentially disastrous consequences of climate change. In this article, we ask how this acknowledgement of climate change influences institutionalized macroeconomic policy advise on decarbonization. Specifically, we identify and analyze 562 documents – reports, articles and newspaper contributions – spanning 25 years of advice by the official Danish Economic Council (DEC) on policies to support growing shares of wind power in the national energy mix. We analyze 1) how DEC has analyzed various policies to support wind power; 2) the conclusions and policy advise they advance; and 3) how they support these in terms of empirical and theoretical argumentation.
We find that DEC is consistently ‘climate conservatives’, that is, even when acknowledging the seriousness of climate change, they systematically oppose all but a very narrow set of allegedly market-efficient instruments. Moreover, across changing political and institutional circumstances, such as the introduction and reform of a European Emissions Trading System (ETS), we find that basic closed-system assumptions of neoclassical economic theory play a critical role in producing this climate conservatism – notably by reversing the burden of proof in that the market is assumed to optimize social outcomes unless proved otherwise.
We conclude with reflections on how such ontologies-assumptions in dominant macroeconomic expertise should be both made more transparent and debatable, while maintaining that relevant policy advice may still be informed by economic analysis when it comes to climate policies.
Publications
Ossandón, J., Pallesen, T., Karnøe, P., Georg, S. (2024). Making good economies with bad economic instruments, accepted for publication in Journal of Valuation Studies, special issue on Valuation and critique in the “good economy”.
Karnøe, P., Iuel-Stissing, Georg, S. (2024). Uncertainties and materialities of biomas in dynamics of market framing, forthcoming in Geiger S. et al (eds) Market Studies: Mapping, Theorizing and Impacting Market Action, Cambridge University Press.
Karnøe, P. and Garud, R. (2022). Transformation of the Danish Wind Turbine Industry through Path Creation, in Kathleen Araujo (ed), Routledge’s Handbook of Energy Transitions.
Karnøe, P., Kirkegaard, J. K., Caliskan, K. (2022). Introducing the lens of markets-in-the-making to Transition Studies: The case of the Danish wind power market agencement. Journal for Environmental Innovation and Societal Change.