The need for policy coherence to trigger a transition to biogas production

• Policy coherence is analysed using an actor perspective and TIS functions.
• New analytical insights combining policy coherence and innovations are presented.
• Actor perspective is useful in identifying relevant policies and their effects.
• Coherent policy goals pushed for biogas production but incoherent policy instruments downplayed the effect.
• Policy incoherence may also have innovation triggering effects.

Transitions towards more sustainable societies involve policy changes cutting across multiple sectors. Ideally, policies targeting different sectors create a coherent push for the adoption of more sustainable solutions. Sustainability transition studies have, however, paid little attention to the role of policy interaction across different policy domains. By focusing on biogas production in Finland and by further developing the technological innovation systems functions in connection to policy coherence, this paper examines how policy coherence is related to triggering transition from the perspective of biogas actors. The results demonstrate how supportive policies in one sector are made inefficient by unsupportive policies, instruments and practices in others. However, the lack of policy coherence, especially at the local level, may also have innovation-triggering influence when it forces actors to consider unconventional solutions. Thus the innovation effects of policy coherence are difficult to foresee and require an actor-focused perspective for analysis.