Transformative mission-oriented innovation policy aims to redirect innovation, but evidence of this directional ability is limited. This paper examines whether transformer missions redirect values reflected by mission-oriented projects. We study the EU Mission ‘Restore our Ocean and Waters’ and use probabilistic topic modelling and thematic analyses to identify, conceptualize, and compare latent values described in 17 policy documents (i.e., strategic layer), 37 mission-oriented projects, and 809 mission-relevant projects (i.e., operational layer). We map how these values changed during the mission launch. The results of this study are ambivalent. On the one hand, the mission launch corresponds with an increase of funded projects of which mission-oriented projects commonly frame efforts towards mission objectives. On the other hand, there is a misalignment between policy and project-level values while the prevalence of project-level values remained largely unaffected by the mission. These mixed results provide a more nuanced understanding of transformer missions’ directional abilities.

This paper demonstrates an approach to assess, ex ante, the social acceptance of sustainable heating systems in city districts. More sustainable heating systems are required in city districts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. However, these systems may lack social acceptance as they often require significant adjustments to homes and may lead to a noticeable loss of in-home thermal comfort. Predicting social acceptance is often difficult due to the long-term planning horizon for energy systems. It is therefore unclear which design requirements and policy guidelines need to be specified ex ante. We suggest an approach to anticipate social acceptance by identifying value conflicts embedded in sustainable heating systems in specific social settings. These value conflicts might cause a lack of social acceptance over time due to value change. We demonstrate this approach using a case of community-driven heating initiative in The Hague, the Netherlands. We identify value conflicts embedded in various sustainable heating systems using an agent-based model. We formulate scenarios of value change to understand the severity of resulting social acceptance issues and discuss suitable heating systems for the city district. The approach can be used to support the decision-making process of policymakers at the local level, even in situations of limited local expertise.

This paper explores capability conflicts in the deployment of decentralised energy systems and identifies the affected population. These systems have positive societal impacts in terms of sustainability and consumer empowerment, but they are not accessible to all and their deployment may increase socio-economic inequalities. The societal impacts of decentralised energy systems can be understood in terms of conflicting capabilities; for some citizens capabilities may increase, whereas for others they may decrease. While problematic, capability conflicts may not be inherent. They may only occur in certain neighbourhoods, for example, where both affluent and less affluent populations coexist. By understanding why these capability conflicts occur, we may be able to anticipate whether these decentralised energy projects could result in societal problems. We use agent-based modelling and the scenario discovery technique to identify capability conflicts and the populations that may be affected. We distinguish five classes of conflicts, which can be used to anticipate social acceptance issues. Affected populations can be involved in the decision-making process to foster acceptance of decentralised energy systems. This work contributes to the growing political and scientific debate on issues of energy justice and inclusiveness related to the energy transition. Additionally, we contribute to the operationalisation of such capabilities, as this is one of the first papers to formalise the Capability Approach using an agent-based model.

This paper aims to anticipate social acceptance issues related to the deployment of the smart electricity grid by identifying underlying value conflicts. The smart electricity grid is a key enabler of the energy transition. Its successful deployment is however jeopardized by social acceptance issues, such as concerns related to privacy and fairness. Social acceptance issues may be explained by value conflicts, i.e. the impossibility for a technological or regulatory design to simultaneously satisfy multiple societal expectations. Due to unsatisfied expectations concerning values, social discontent may arise. This paper identifies five groups of value conflicts in the smart electricity grid: consumer values versus competitiveness, IT enabled systems versus data protection, fair spatial distributions of energy systems versus system performance, market performance versus local trading, and individual access versus economies of scale. This is important for policy-makers and industry to increase the chances that the technology gains acceptance. As resolving value conflicts requires resources, this paper suggests three factors to prioritize their resolution: severity of resulting acceptance issues, resolvability of conflicts, and the level of resources required. The analysis shows that particularly the socio-economic disparities caused by the deployment of the smart electricity grid are alarming. Affordable policies are currently limited, but the impact in terms of social acceptance may be large.

This paper proposes an approach to capturing and reviewing scientific literature addressing latent topics across multiple scientific fields. As latent topics like moral values are affected by word polysemy and synonymy, a traditional keyword-based approach is often ineffective and therefore inappropriate. As a result, scientific literature addressing latent topics tends to be fragmented thereby constraining efforts to address similar and complementary research challenges. A novel approach to reviewing the literature by utilizing both semantic fields and probabilistic topic models has therefore been developed. We illustrate this approach by reviewing the literature addressing the value justice in the energy sector and compare this with a regular keyword-based approach. The new approach results in a more complete overview of the relevance of energy justice as compared to the traditional keyword-based approach. This novel approach can be applied to other latent topics including other values or phenomena such as societal resistance to technologies, thereby leading to an increased understanding of existing relevant literature and the identification of new areas of research.

Ethics by Design concerns the methods, algorithms and tools needed to endow autonomous agents with the capability to reason about the ethical aspects of their decisions, and the methods, tools and formalisms to guarantee that an agent's behavior remains within given moral bounds. In this context some questions arise: How and to what extent can agents understand the social reality in which they operate, and the other intelligences (AI, animals and humans) with which they co-exist? What are the ethical concerns in the emerging new forms of society, and how do we ensure the human dimension is upheld in interactions and decisions by autonomous agents?. But overall, the central question is: "Can we, and should we, build ethically-aware agents?" This paper presents initial conclusions from the thematic day of the same name held at PRIMA2017, on October 2017.