Sebastian Sewerin specialises in comparative public policy and regulation & governance, with a focus on climate and energy policy as well as related policy subsystems. Substantially, his work includes systematic analyses of complex policy mixes targeting renewable energy as well as battery-electric vehicles (BEVs) and energy storage technologies. He is particularly interested in the temporal dynamics of policy change and the underlying interaction between policy output, policy effects and subsequent politics in long-term policy feedback loops. To this end, Sebastian brings together theories and concepts from political science (policy change, policy feedback, policy design) and innovation studies (technology characteristics) to better understand the co-evolution of policy and technology. For his conceptual and empirical contributions, he was awarded the Ken Young Prize and a Special Commendation of the INOGOV research network, respectively.
Sebastian joined IES after spending 8 years at ETH Zurich’s Energy and Technology Policy Group, where he worked as a Senior Researcher and Lecturer on projects related to the co-evolution of policy and technology and obtained his Habilitation in Political Science. He holds a PhD from the Cologne Graduate School in Management, Economics and Social Sciences (Cologne, Germany) and was a PhD visiting scholar at the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research at the University of East Anglia (Norwich, UK). He undertook postdoctoral research at Yale School of the Environment (New Haven, US), Johnson-Shoyama Graduate School of Public Policy (Saskatoon, Canada) and was scheduled to staying at the Crawford School of Public Policy (Canberra, Australia) when Covid-19 made it impossible to travel to Australia. Prior to his PhD, Sebastian worked at a leading German environmental think tank, the Wuppertal Institute for Climate, Environment and Energy. His academic work has been supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation, the Fritz Thyssen Foundation and the Heinrich Böll Foundation.
Sebastian’s research is published with Oxford University Press and in journals like Nature Energy, Policy and Society, Policy Studies Journal, Policy Sciences, Regulation & Governance, Research Policy and Climate Policy. He also contributes to international organizations’ reports like the UN Environment’s 6th Global Environment Outlook.
In his free time, he wonders why anyone would be interested in what he is doing in his free time.
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