Rory Hooper

I earned my Bachelor's in Mechatronics engineering back home in Auckland, New Zealand, but decided to make the move to Delft to broaden my education and focus on more socio-technical issues. 

From narratives to models of why and how policies succeed or fail: an analysis of carbon pricing policy

Attempts to address grand societal challenges, such as the energy transition, are often grounded on policy interventions. These policy interventions, however, often fail to adequately address the challenges they were designed to tackle. One notable example is carbon pricing policy. Despite some ambitious claims, empirical studies of existing carbon pricing schemes suggest that they have had only a limited impact on emissions.

Future carbon pricing policy development could benefit from the analysis of existing programs, and indeed other policy areas could benefit from the analysis of existing policies in a relevant domain. Unfortunately, however, such analysis is often limited to case specific policy reviews employing disjointed theoretical foundations. As a result, more comprehensive insights into the factors and dynamics which contribute to policy success or failure can be difficult to obtain. This research aims to explore how policy analysis literature, spanning different levels of empirical analysis, can be systematically synthesised to produce relevant insights for policy development. To achieve this aim, a systematic method will be developed to create and aggregate conceptual models of policy analysis literature with the aid of natural language processing tools. Building a comprehensive representation of policy analysis literature for a relevant domain is expected to provide a richer evidence base to inform subsequent policy development.

With my thesis I aim to clarify the most pertinent factors and dynamics contributing to the success or failure of carbon pricing policy and ultimately develop a framework which can contribute to the development of more effective, evidence-based policy in general. For an undertaking as important as the energy transition, we cannot afford to repeat the mistakes of the past.

Graduation committee - Nihit Goyal (first supervisor), Lisa Scholten (second supervision), Kornelis Blok (chair)