Ó Maonaigh, Conchúr (2023) Driving the Decarbonizing City: The role of electric vehicles in Dublin’s sustainability transition. PhD thesis, National University of Ireland Maynooth.

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Abstract

The notion of ‘sustainability transition’ has recently gained traction in human geography. At issue are the emerging dynamics and material configurations underlying the spaces, modalities, and pathways associated with decarbonisation. This thesis examines the role of electric vehicles (EVs) and associated infrastructures in sustainability transitions in Dublin, Ireland. The Irish government, driven in large part by regulations set at the EU level, has introduced a series of initiatives to establish an EV market in Ireland. In turn, Dublin has become a key location for state-led but market-oriented experimental projects and interventions aimed at facilitating the sale and use of EVs. Many of these projects fail to live up to the sustainability hype and tend to enrol users in the promotion, management, and governance of decarbonisation in chaotic but as-of-yet uncharted ways. Against this general backdrop, I draw upon scholarship on the multi-level perspective (MLP), urban political ecology (UPE), and Marxian approaches to urban development to examine how the emergence of alliances between public and private actors alongside EV users produce new practices, spaces, and fixes aimed at shaping the shift towards in EVs in Dublin. I use a qualitative analysis of 72 semi-structured interviewers with the ‘drivers’ who steer the shift towards EVs: 39 EV users; 23 representatives from Irish and international firms operating in and around the EV sector (e.g., automotive dealerships and charge point installation companies); and ten interviews with respondents from the public sector and regulatory bodies. I advance a theoretical framework, which I refer to as Critical Urban Transition Studies (CUTS), to analyse the differentiated structures, agency, and power relations that underpin Dublin’s sustainability transition. By applying CUTS to Dublin, I examine how neoliberalization is entangled with relations, actions, and pathways that underpin the shift towards EVs. As a result, an inadequate, disordered, and unequal decarbonisation project emerges that exerts pressure on the actors involved to forge alliances that are capable of pivoting, circumventing, or fixing, for a time at least, some of the tensions emerging from the chaotic unfolding of EVs and associated infrastructures in the city. I make three wider contributions to geographical knowledge: First, I identify several ways that neoliberal policymaking and experimentation affect urban sustainability transitions; second, I expand on the concept of cross-class alliances to examine how coalitions between technology users and public and private sector actors shape the city; finally, I build on the notion of ‘the glitch’ to apprehend the relationship between neoliberalism and digital technologies in shaping decarbonisation.

Item Type:	Thesis (PhD)
Keywords:	Decarbonizing City; role; electric vehicles; Dublin’s sustainability transition;
Academic Unit:	Faculty of Social Sciences > Geography
Item ID:	18638
Depositing User:	IR eTheses
Date Deposited:	11 Jun 2024 10:18
URI:
Use Licence:	This item is available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial Share Alike Licence (CC BY-NC-SA). Details of this licence are available here

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