Abstract
The very name ‘rebound effect’, and the metaphor it calls up, suggests something disconcerting and thwarting: you throw a ball, but it bounces back in your face, leaving you surprised, bruised — and back where you started in relation to what you were trying to achieve. Rebound is disconcerting because it undermines the common-sense assumption that if you pull a policy lever, things will move in the direction that you pull rather than the opposite — or, to put it a bit more formally, that the overall effects of a policy intervention will be consistent with its immediate effects.
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© 2009 Roger Levett
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Levett, R. (2009). Rebound and Rational Public Policy-Making. In: Herring, H., Sorrell, S. (eds) Energy Efficiency and Sustainable Consumption. Energy, Climate and the Environment Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230583108_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230583108_9
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