The extent to which modelled future pathways support effective climate policy making has been questioned for a long time, with one major issue being the insufficient integration with the perspectives of policymakers and further stakeholders. It has been suggested to deal with this issue by designing facilitative dialogues between modelers and stakeholders to develop transformative policy mixes for system transformations (Rogge et al. 2020). While concrete methods of co-creation are currently tested in different projects, they are not yet analyzed and validated sufficiently regarding their contribution and function in participatory processes to co-create transformative policy mixes. One promising approach here seems to utilize the characteristics of the concerned transformation processes.

Phase 1 of SYSTRA, however, found that the current state of research on the characterization of transformations is quite limited. Therefore, a broader set of dimensions has been derived from various literature sources, empirical case studies and expert knowledge (Edler et al. 2020).

Based on this, the project COTRAP aims at providing a conceptual link between the transformation dimensions with the process of stakeholder integration when co-designing transformative policy mixes. In particular, the project will address the following main research questions:

• Which dimensions of a transformation are particularly relevant to the co-creation of transformative policy mixes?
• How should the processes of stakeholder mapping and future-oriented dialogues aiming at the co-creation of transformative policy mixes reflect these dimensions?

COTRAP’s methodology involves a systematic synthesis of the conceptual and methodological state of the art in three areas (policy mixes, stakeholder mapping, transformation dimensions). Based on this, a novel co-creation approach for co-creating transformative policy mixes will be developed, applied and refined to a generally applicable tool. COTRAP’s conceptual and methodological work will be applied to empirical case studies funded through the H2020 project PARIS REINFORCE.

• Edler, J.; Köhler, J.; Wydra, S.; Salas Gironés, E.; Schiller, K.; Braun, A. (2020): Dimensions of systems and transformations: Towards an integrated framework for system transformations. Submitted to the IST conference.
• Rogge, K. S., Pfluger, B., & Geels, F. W. (2020). Transformative policy mixes in socio-technical scenarios: The case of the low-carbon transition of the German electricity system (2010–2050). Technological Forecasting and Social Change.