Investigating transition pathways and transition failures and proposing policy solutions to cope with transition failures; Iran’s wind turbine industry

This paper aims to investigate transition paths and reasons of failure of Iran’s wind turbines industry in transition to sustainability successfully. In this regard, a qualitative approach and case study strategy have been used. For this purpose, based on type of national innovation system, the transition path and sustainability transition status of the wind turbines industry in selected countries were studied. Then the historical evolution of wind turbines industry in Iran has been surveyed from 1988 to 2020, and the current situation of this industry based on sustainable transitions and multilevel level perspective theoretical framework (MLP) and transition paths in each period of development has been identified. In the next step, the reasons of failure in the development stages of the industry are extracted based on the qualitative analysis of semi-structured interviews with industry experts. Then, based on innovative logic in the literature of innovation policies and the experiences of the studied countries, appropriate policy proposals are presented to pave the way for the transition of Iran’s wind turbines industry. The results of this study show that transition of Iran's wind turbines industry has been identified in the three stages, the path of first stage (1988-2007) was of the transformation path type, the second stage (2007-2016) was of the reconfiguration type. However, in the third stage (2016-2020), Iran's wind turbines industry has not been able to use technological alternatives to transition to sustainability because of some reasons such as directionality failure, demand articulation failure, policy coordination failure and reflexivity failure.