The UK’s wicked Net Zero Transition
Publication Date
July 31, 2026
Creator
Wilson, Oisin
Abstract
This thesis investigates the narratives that shape the United Kingdom’s Net Zero Transition (NZT), focusing on how different visions of legitimacy, justice, and agency emerge and interact within multi-stakeholder processes of climate governance. While technical solutions to climate change dominate policy discourse, this study foregrounds the narrative dimensions of transition, drawing on the Delivering Net Zero (DNZ) project, a research collaboration involving a series of structured workshops with policymakers, business actors, academics, and civil society representatives. The study employs narrative analysis and abductive thematic coding (Braun and Clarke, 2006; Fereday and Muir-Cochrane, 2006) to interrogate how diverse stakeholders frame the problems, pathways, and politics of NZT.
Four narratives were identified across the dataset: Ecomodern, Crisis, Justice, and Technocratic. The Ecomodern narrative promotes a vision of decarbonisation led by technological innovation, market incentives, and state investment in infrastructure, drawing on discourses of ecological modernisation (Hajer, 1995; Bernstein, 1991). It emphasises continuity-led logic in governance and economic growth (Winskel & Kattirtzi, 2019). In contrast, the Crisis narrative constructs NZT as an urgent and disruptive response to ecological breakdown, often linked to broader critiques of capitalism and ecological overshoot (Boulton, 2016; Hickel, 2019).
The Justice narrative centres procedural and distributive justice, positing that NZT must be socially inclusive and participatory to be legitimate. It draws on energy justice literature (Jenkins et al., 2018; Sovacool et al., 2022) and social movement framings of equity and democracy (Newell and Mulvaney, 2013; Jasanoff, 2018). Finally, the Technocratic narrative constructs NZT as a problem of coordination, information, and expertise. It privileges expert-led planning, behavioural nudges, and institutional efficiency, resonating with models of depoliticised governance (Pielke, 2007; Sarewitz, 2010). While each narrative represents a coherent view, they are often in tension, particularly around themes of urgency, justice, and public agency.
The study engages theoretical literature on wicked problems (Rittel and Webber, 1973; Head, 2008), socio-technical transitions (Geels et al., 2018; Köhler et al., 2019), and deliberative governance (Dryzek, 2009; Stirling, 2014) to interpret the narrative divergences observed. It finds that narratives act as framing devices that structure stakeholder perceptions of feasibility, responsibility, and legitimacy. Further, the analysis suggests that dominant institutions tend to foreground Ecomodern and Technocratic logics, often marginalising justice-centred framings. Even within participatory processes, pluralism is constrained by tacit norms about what counts as 'reasonable' discourse, a pattern that mirrors broader critiques of post-political climate governance (Turnhout et al., 2020).
Methodologically, the research reflects critically on its own embeddedness within the DNZ project, identifying a tension between the project’s implicit orientation towards consensus and the thesis’s more constructivist, pluralistic analytic framework. This disjunction mirrors broader tensions in climate research between instrumental and reflexive epistemologies. The thesis concludes by arguing that understanding the NZT as a narrative and political project is vital to ensuring more inclusive, democratic, and legitimate transitions.
Item Type
ethesis
Thesis Type
EngD
Supervisors
Subjects (LC)
Associated Schools / Departments
Faculty of Engineering
eprints ID
82952
UoN Repository URI
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