Compound path dependence in green transitions: a comparative analysis of EV policy coordination in Indonesia and Thailand

IF 4.5 3区管理学 Q1 PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION

Policy Sciences Pub Date : 2026-05-05 DOI:10.1007/s11077-026-09614-y

Chunhua Ye, Yiyun Xia, Yixian Sun, Benjamin Cashore

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引用次数: 0

Abstract

Why do countries facing similar pressures for electric vehicle (EV) transitions adopt different policy coordination arrangements? Existing scholarship pays less attention to how historically rooted institutional configurations shape the emergence and persistence of coordination modes. This article addresses this gap through a comparative study of Indonesia and Thailand, two Southeast Asian middle-income economies that adopted national EV strategies in the late 2010s but developed divergent coordination trajectories. Drawing on historical institutionalism, it develops a framework of compound path dependence, arguing that coordination arrangements are shaped by the interaction of technical lock-in, relational networks, and organizational learning. Using comparative process tracing from the 1960s–2024, the analysis identifies two distinct governance modes: in Thailand, consensus-based incrementalism built on strong industrial capacity, institutionalized consultation, and committee-based routines; while in Indonesia, directive-driven ad-hocism rooted in a resource-centered development path and weaker industrial coordination legacies. Through this, this study advances the literature on public policy and sustainability transitions. It reveals a critical trade-off between institutional coherence and policy agility in sustainability transition, and argues that policy coordination choice is a product of structure-induced agency constrained by historical legacies.

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绿色转型中的复合路径依赖：印尼和泰国电动汽车政策协调的比较分析

为什么面临类似电动汽车转型压力的国家采取不同的政策协调安排？现有的学术研究较少关注历史根源的制度配置如何影响协调模式的出现和持续。本文通过对印度尼西亚和泰国这两个东南亚中等收入经济体的比较研究来解决这一差距，这两个经济体在2010年代末采用了国家电动汽车战略，但发展出了不同的协调轨迹。借鉴历史制度主义，本文提出了复合路径依赖的框架，认为协调安排是由技术锁定、关系网络和组织学习的相互作用形成的。通过对20世纪60年代至2024年的比较过程追踪，该分析确定了两种不同的治理模式：在泰国，基于共识的渐进主义建立在强大的工业能力、制度化的协商和基于委员会的惯例之上；而在印尼，指令驱动型的自主主义根植于以资源为中心的发展道路和较弱的产业协调遗产。通过此，本研究推进了公共政策与可持续性转型的文献研究。它揭示了可持续性转型中制度一致性和政策敏捷性之间的关键权衡，并认为政策协调选择是受历史遗产约束的结构诱导的机构的产物。

本文章由计算机程序翻译，如有差异，请以英文原文为准。

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来源期刊

Policy Sciences Multiple-

CiteScore

9.70

自引率

9.40%

发文量

期刊介绍： The policy sciences are distinctive within the policy movement in that they embrace the scholarly traditions innovated and elaborated by Harold D. Lasswell and Myres S. McDougal. Within these pages we provide space for approaches that are problem-oriented, contextual, and multi-method in orientation. There are many other journals in which authors can take top-down, deductive, and large-sample approach or adopt a primarily theoretical focus. Policy Sciences encourages systematic and empirical investigations in which problems are clearly identified from a practical and theoretical perspective, are well situated in the extant literature, and are investigated utilizing methodologies compatible with contextual, as opposed to reductionist, understandings. We tend not to publish pieces that are solely theoretical, but favor works in which the applied policy lessons are clearly articulated. Policy Sciences favors, but does not publish exclusively, works that either explicitly or implicitly utilize the policy sciences framework. The policy sciences can be applied to articles with greater or lesser intensity to accommodate the focus of an author’s work. At the minimum, this means taking a problem oriented, multi-method or contextual approach. At the fullest expression, it may mean leveraging central theory or explicitly applying aspects of the framework, which is comprised of three principal dimensions: (1) social process, which is mapped in terms of participants, perspectives, situations, base values, strategies, outcomes and effects, with values (power, wealth, enlightenment, skill, rectitude, respect, well-being, and affection) being the key elements in understanding participants’ behaviors and interactions; (2) decision process, which is mapped in terms of seven functions—intelligence, promotion, prescription, invocation, application, termination, and appraisal; and (3) problem orientation, which comprises the intellectual tasks of clarifying goals, describing trends, analyzing conditions, projecting developments, and inventing, evaluating, and selecting alternatives. There is a more extensive core literature that also applies and can be visited at the policy sciences website: http://www.policysciences.org/classicworks.cfm. In addition to articles that explicitly utilize the policy sciences framework, Policy Sciences has a long tradition of publishing papers that draw on various aspects of that framework and its central theory as well as high quality conceptual pieces that address key challenges, opportunities, or approaches in ways congruent with the perspective that this journal strives to maintain and extend.Officially cited as: Policy Sci