HYPOTHESIS AND THEORY article
Front. Sustain.
Sec. Modeling and Optimization for Decision Support
This article is part of the Research TopicTransdisciplinary Engineering for Sustainability DecisionsView all 6 articles
The potential for a transdisciplinary systems approach to improve national policy analysis: learning from UK cases of home energy transitions
Provisionally accepted
- 1Department of Science, Technology, Engineering and Public Policy, Faculty of Engineering Sciences, University College London, London, England, United Kingdom
- 2University of the West of England, Bristol, England, United Kingdom
- 3The Open University (United Kingdom), Milton Keynes, England, United Kingdom
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The urgent imperative to decarbonise societies requries effective decisions to neogotiate interconnections of people, technology and policies. In this theory paper, we hypothesise that integrating transdisciplinary engineering with systems approaches can provide useful principles and tools to support effective sustainability policymaking. We consider this hypothesis in the context of a historic and current UK energy sector transition: (a) the transition from 'town-gas' to natural gas in the 1960-1970s and (b) the current shift from natural gas to low carbon domestic heating, focussing on heat pump deployment. Through these case-studies, we find that transdisciplinary and systems approaches are apparent in the sucessful historic transition, while remaining largely absent in the present low carbon heating transition, which is currently stalled. We argue this is caused by policy analysis being siloed and economically focused. We present two systems approach examples to show how they might be applied to begin addressing current UK policy failures for low carbon heating. We identify benefits while recognising some key limitations of this approach, including the resource requirements on officials. The paper concludes with suggestions for further research to continue developing the conceptual and practical basis and therefore lead to improved decision making in national sustainability policymaking. (199 words of 200).
Keywords: carbon reduction3, domesticheating4, heat pumps7, Policy6, sociotechnica5, systems approach2, transdisciplinary engineering1
Received: 14 Apr 2025; Accepted: 30 Jan 2026.
Copyright: © 2026 Cooper, Wise and Eckert. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence:
Adam C G Cooper
Freya Wise
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