The twin transition paradox

The challenge

Infrastructure owners are asked to digitalise and to decarbonise at the same time, and the two demands are not independent. The technologies offered as the route to net-zero — digital twins, artificial intelligence, dense sensing — carry an energy cost of their own. Pursuing one goal harder can move the other further away.

Leaders cannot resolve this by choosing a side, because the demands are interdependent and both persist. They have to keep acting while the tension stays live. Very little is known about how they actually do that.

The question

How do infrastructure owners and businesses navigate paradoxes arising from simultaneous digitalisation and sustainability transitions, at intra-organisational and ecosystem levels?

What we will study

The research project works at two levels that paradox research has largely kept apart, and then joins them.

Expected contribution

For practice: a way for infrastructure leaders to recognise these tensions early and a repertoire of responses that does not depend on pretending the conflict away. For theory: an account of how a paradox behaves when it arrives from outside the organisation — from regulation and public expectation rather than from the pursuit of profit — and how it travels between the organisations that deliver infrastructure together.

How we will study this

Infra-PaX is built as a longitudinal, embedded case study across several Dutch infrastructure owners, run as engaged scholarship rather than observation from outside. At the micro-level we follow leaders through the strategic episodes where a paradox surfaces, using process research and extended ethnographic fieldwork inside partner organisations. At the macro-level we map the same tensions across the wider ecosystem — owners, contractors, regulators, communities — using a multi-level perspective and systems thinking, so that path-dependences between organisations become visible.

The two levels then meet in facilitated focus groups with the people whose decisions we have been studying, so that findings are tested and built on with practitioners rather than delivered to them. A fuller methodological account will follow for academic readers.