EU Green Transition Research Favors Policy and Society Over Energy Solutions

A sweeping analysis of the scientific literature on innovation and the green transition in the European Union has revealed a striking imbalance: researchers are far more likely to study policy frameworks, economic questions and social dynamics than the technical energy solutions that the transition ultimately depends on. The study, a systematic literature review, examined 152 eligible publications and mapped the topics they cover, the connections between them and, crucially, the gaps where almost no research exists at all. Its central conclusion is that research output on the EU’s green transition is dominated by policy and societal dimensions, while localised studies and energy topics hold comparatively the least interest.

The review employed a semi-systematic search built on the PRISMA scheme, the standard protocol for identifying, screening and including studies in systematic reviews, combined with the CIMO logic, which structures a research question around Context, Intervention, Mechanism and Outcome. The ultimate research question asked what the most common innovation initiatives are that prevail in implementing or accelerating the green energy transition in the EU. The final query, run on Scopus on 21 February 2024, initially returned 197 records, which were narrowed through exclusion criteria such as removal of duplicates and publications without a valid DOI, restriction to specific document types and English language, down to 137 eligible papers, all screened for explicit links to innovation. A complementary, less structured search in Google Scholar added 16 more publications, bringing the total pool to 152 studies.

To classify this body of work, the team used a content-based approach rather than a conventional bibliometric one. Instead of fixing thematic categories in advance, they let categories emerge from the literature itself through a modified version of a proxy approach developed in earlier research. Every paper was tagged, often with multiple keywords, and these proxies were iteratively regrouped as the pool grew, so that the clustering evolved according to the literature reviewed. The result was seven broad categories: Policy, Innovation and Research; Industry and Economy; Localised studies; Energy; Society; Digital transition and New Tech; and Environment. A separate comparison analysis was run using the VOSviewer software.

The temporal pattern of the literature is telling. Although no time limits were imposed on the search, every retrieved study was published after 2016, in the aftermath of the United Nations’ adoption of the Sustainable Development Goals in 2015, suggesting that the establishment of the green transition narrative in the scientific literature matches the aftermath of the internationally agreed sustainability goals. Only 11 papers appeared before 2019, but publication accelerated sharply in 2020, with 25 papers that year, and the pace remained sustained until it began to level off around 2024. Geographically, the majority of studies, 91 in total, focused on individual countries, while 61 had an international or undefined scope, suggesting that research on the green transition remains predominantly oriented towards national and local investigations of individual member states rather than EU-wide or global explorations.

The headline finding concerns where the research weight lies. The three categories the authors describe as the soft sciences, Policy, Innovation and Research, Industry and Economy, and Society, together account for roughly 70 percent of the collected papers. Within the policy cluster, which was the main topic in 104 papers, the UN Sustainable Development Goals were the most popular proxy, appearing in 51 studies, while EU-funded initiatives were the least studied with just 10. The authors note that in the five years after the SDGs were agreed, seven papers on that theme were published, whereas 18 papers have addressed the EU Green Deal in the period from 2020 to the start of 2025, and they expect a similar and greater uptake in Green Deal-focused research as its timeline advances.

The Industry and Economy cluster carried the most proxies, ten in all, and was the main topic in 83 papers. Sustainability and innovation in organisations’ operations was the most popular proxy with 28 papers, while jobs and green skills was the least popular with just three. The reviewed studies range from an empirical case where industrial processes minimised crop losses, to survey data from Italian companies on energy consumption and decarbonisation, to Portuguese analyses of organisational commitments towards the SDGs. Macroeconomic studies mostly presented applied methodologies, including advanced statistical assessments of the relationship between economic globalisation and decarbonisation technologies and a synthetic development indicator applied to Eastern Europe. Green finance studies showed that green taxation and changes across emissions trading systems relate to categories outside the economic cluster, indicating potential implications across other sectors, while public-private relationships and job creation remained under-represented.

By contrast, the Energy category was the main topic in only 35 papers, and Localised studies in just 25. Within energy research, the green energy transition itself dominated with 23 papers, spanning topics from human rights to clean energy and policy obstacles, while green and e-mobility and built-environment energy performance attracted only eight each. Only a handful of studies dealt with renewable energy technologies and investments or energy storage. The authors offer possible explanations: energy outcomes may often be reported as technical studies outside the green transition and SDG discourse, or research at the energy-industry interface may be oriented towards commercialisation rather than academic publication, and they acknowledge that the initial keyword selection for the search may have constrained the energy results. In the localised cluster, urban focus studies led with 11 papers on urban transformations, smart cities and urban agriculture, while islands attracted only three, two concerned with energy and one with water. Just 12 percent of the eligible papers referred to an urban or rural setting, and rural studies mostly linked local development to community and cooperation rather than technical topics.

The Society cluster, the main topic in 72 papers, was led by human behaviour, personal traits and beliefs with 23 studies, largely surveys of stakeholder opinions across farming, energy, mobility, education and waste management, while heritage appeared in only four. Education and pedagogical innovation emerged as a strong priority, with proposals for updated curricula, social innovation and sustainability in educational settings gathering enough interest that this proxy encompasses more papers than other highly relevant topics such as renewable energy, mobility or smart cities. Justice studies were mostly found in reference to an equitable and inclusive energy transition. The Digital transition and New Tech category, the main topic in 42 papers, was led by farming advancements with 13 studies, including laser technologies, digital adoption and eco-innovations in sheep farming, while pharmaceuticals and healthcare innovation appeared in only two. Artificial intelligence and Industry 4.0 applications emerged as horizontal issues across materials development, higher education and energy systems. The Environment category, the main topic in 41 papers, was dominated by forestry, agriculture and aquaculture with 22 studies, often tied to circular economy practices, while maritime topics appeared in only three, and the authors note a lack of studies on decarbonisation of the EU building stock, energy-intensive industries and the aviation and maritime sectors.

The cross-linkage analysis sharpened the picture. By counting how often papers simultaneously addressed proxies from different categories, the researchers found that the most cross-linked domains were Environment with Policy, Innovation and Research, tied with Environment and Industry and Economy, followed by Society with Policy, and Industry and Economy with Policy. Society topics in relation to Industry and Economy were explored in 31 papers, while Energy and Localised studies were jointly investigated in only six. The authors interpret the dominant pattern as a triple helix of industrial innovation serving societal needs under the guidance of policy, with comparatively little attention paid to the environment, the twin digital and energy transitions, and place-based research. The gap analysis went further, identifying topics entirely absent from the intersections of the six highest-ranking categories. Islands, education and pedagogical innovation, smart cities and urban planning, and environmental quality and indoor air quality were each missing from four of the six. The single most commonly missing topic was pharmaceuticals and healthcare innovation, absent from all six, though the authors caution that this gap is not necessarily linked to the most urgent needs of the transition. The human behaviour category, despite being popular overall, held the most internal gaps, indicating that research there concentrates on a narrow range of questions, while the accelerating transformation and innovation category proved the most well-rounded.

The comparison with VOSviewer, which ran a co-occurrence analysis of all keywords with fractional counting and a minimum of two occurrences, produced seven clusters but proved less elaborate than the content-based analysis. The software split references to the Sustainable Development Goals into multiple distinct items, likely because of variability in spelling, and some publications lacked keywords altogether, creating ambiguity in the robustness of the co-occurrence results. The authors conclude that while the proxy approach demands more manual effort, it is preferable for small datasets where precise research gaps matter. The study carries clear limitations: the search was collected in February 2025 and complemented during revision, so later publications were excluded, publication delays mean the counts for 2024 and 2025 may be inconclusive, with reliable trend insights limited to years before 2024, and the assignment of topics under each proxy category was partly subjective, though the authors argue the emerging classification reflects the literature pool as a whole. Within those bounds, the conclusions are pointed: despite the considerable greenhouse gas emission burden of the energy and buildings sectors, and the global carbon footprints of maritime and aviation, these domains remain under-documented, the role of local authorities and grassroots action is not well reflected, and no quantitative assessments of the EU Green Deal appeared in the pool, unlike the many for the SDGs. The authors call for future work on local innovation ecosystems, on the energy dimension of the transition at the intersection of global economics and green finance within the context of the new emissions trading system, and on the energy and water consumption of data centres as artificial intelligence penetration reshapes global energy demand.

Subject of Research: A systematic literature review of innovation research topics on the EU green transition

Article Title: Emerging research topics on the role of innovation in the green transition in the EU

Article References: Kyprianou, I., Papadopoulos, P., Kafantari, N., & Montagnino, F. M. (2026). Emerging research topics on the role of innovation in the green transition in the EU. Energy Reports, 16, Article 109800. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.egyr.2026.109800

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1016/j.egyr.2026.109800

Keywords: green transition, European Green Deal, innovation, systematic literature review, PRISMA, sustainable development goals, energy transition, research gaps, EU policy, social innovation, circular economy, bibliometric analysis