Achilles’ heels of acceleration? Assessing critical capacity for transformative policy mixes

The urgency of environmental and other societal challenges calls for accelerating sustainability transitions. In particular, the climate crisis requires the effective employment of policy mixes for navigating and stimulating transformative change through the development, adoption, and diffusion of radically innovative solutions in multiple, interacting systems such as the decarbonising energy-mobility systems. However, the current understanding of capacity needs behind such transformative policy mixes is still limited, and the lack of critical capacities can hamper such transformative efforts. Regarding this gap, we contend that future research should better bridge the divide between innovation and policy literatures to generate novel insights on transformative policy capacities required to accelerate sustainability transitions. To do so, we propose an integrated framework incorporating three conceptual components - acceleration challenges, policy mix intervention points, and types of policy capacities - thereby enabling the identification of critical capacities in the acceleration phase of sustainability transitions across various political, sector-specific, and geographical contexts.