Environmental Innovation and Societal Transitions最新文献

In the last four years, since Austria enabled the establishment of energy communities (ECs), their numbers have rapidly increased, and their role in Austria's energy transition has been widely discussed. This study explores how storylines of ECs, as social innovations, have changed during their introduction and diffusion. We adopt a dialectic perspective of niche diffusion and discursive struggles in sustainability transitions. Analyzing newspaper articles and interviews, we reveal initial discursive struggles and the diversification into seven storylines across four contextual phases, shaped particularly by legislative frameworks and the energy crisis. Five storylines construct ECs as positive change, one as a negative force on society, and one as ambivalent. We discuss significant changes in how storylines construct ECs, focusing on justice and citizenship, the reconstruction of actor configurations, and emerging postapocalyptic storylines. This study enriches our understanding of discursive struggles around social innovations and their potential to challenge existing configurations.

Public sector organisations (PSOs) such as municipalities, regulatory bodies, and public utilities are key actors in sustainability transitions. However, the conceptualisation of their transformative capacity is underdeveloped, as several strands of literature pay attention to the topic but remain disjointed. The article takes stock of the literature, reviewing the strengths and weaknesses of the main approaches. Building from there, the article proposes a higher-order holistic conceptual framework based on three constitutive elements: roles, resources, and abilities. We conceptualise the transformative capacity of a public sector organisation as the interaction between its roles, resources, and abilities in the enactment of its transformative agency. This framework offers a granular analytical approach for future empirical studies, acknowledging the diversity of PSOs and sustainability transitions pathways. It also offers practical clues for more targeted efforts to build transformative capacity in PSOs, which is crucial for accelerating transitions.

Domestic heating systems need to change to meet climate targets. We draw on practice theoretical concepts to understand what is needed to integrate heat pumps in Dutch households. From a design orientation, we view households as creative actors integrating technologies into daily life. We report on an ethnographic study of the disruptions and resulting reconfigurations that occur when heat pumps are introduced in Dutch households. Our findings reveal a variety of practice reconfigurations around heat pumps. We also find that these reconfigurations are related to and may influence other practices, including professional practices. We discuss our findings in relation to policy, technology development, and design, and conclude that the required reconfigurations in Dutch household practices could be supported, and that innovative practice reconfigurations emerging from internal household dynamics could contribute to sustainability transitions.

This article contributes to a deeper understanding of the role of capitalism in sustainability transitions by exploring the potential of green entrepreneurs to cultivate alternative economic forms. To this end, we will introduce the classic sociological concept of the spirit of capitalism to sustainability transition research and bring it into dialogue with the concept of economic alterity. Based on qualitative case studies of nine green entrepreneurs, we examine how sustainability motives and capitalist meaning structures are blended in the mindsets of the ecopreneurs. Overall, the economic mentalities of the green ecopreneurs we examined can be characterised as a “green spirit of capitalism”, in the sense of a positive interconnection between capitalist principles and environmental goals. While the ecopreneurs repeatedly broke with capitalist principles in specific situations – for example by sacrificing growth potential or competitive advantages in favour of positive environmental impact – in none of the case studies was the capitalist economic mentality surmounted in any substantial way. This is due to specific stabilisation mechanisms belonging to the capitalist spirit that consolidate the respondents’ economic mentalities in cases of conflict between environmental and economic goals.

In the transition to a renewable energy system, the European Union champions community-based initiatives like energy communities to promote decarbonization as well as broader societal benefits. Despite these goals, there is a marked underrepresentation of women in energy communities. In 15 qualitative interviews with experts in community-led energy organizations mainly from Germany, our study addresses women specific barriers for participation. The modal organizational setup poses barriers in terms of existing male overrepresentation, technical knowledge as entry requirement, a focus on financial investment, heavy and inflexible time requirements, and the lack of social integration of energy communities. Organizational realities align little with women`s motivators for participation, which encompass environmental enthusiasm and social engagement. The nature of the discovered barriers is compatible with the concept of "doing gender", where malleable, socially constructed organizational arrangements perpetuate traditional gender roles and thereby hierarchies.

This policy brief encourages urban policymakers to embrace a stronger circular economy (CE) ambition by applying discontinuation policies. While discontinuation already plays a major role in sectors such as energy, cities have so far mainly focussed on supporting innovations in the CE transition. Using circular construction as an example, this policy brief demonstrates how to apply informational, economic, contractual, regulatory, and ownership-based policy instruments for discontinuation to improve the resource efficiency of urban built environments. Finally, we provide specific policy recommendations for developing an urban discontinuation strategy for circular construction.

Mission-oriented innovation policies (MOIP) do not operate in a vacuum. How missions align with innovation actors, infrastructures and discourses in regional contexts is an ongoing discussion. In this paper, we draw on the case of regional dialogues that aspired to facilitate exchange and learning for the missions of Germany's High-Tech Strategy (HTS). We examine the interactional process of 'regioning' MOIP that draws in diverse publics and concerns, ultimately aiming to create institutional arenas where actors from different levels and scales come together to make sense of missions. More than being explicit objects of innovation policy, regions understood through regioning are an implicit practice of policy. By moving missions between federal and regional arenas, involved actors shape a political space for articulating the directionality of innovation policy.

Reuse is suggested as a strategy to reduce mounting single-use packaging consumption and the related pollution. In this exploratory study, we investigated how governance can create conditions for the uptake of reusable food packaging in Finland when phasing out the existing single use system is not viable. We identified policy instruments addressing packaging reuse and analyzed how key stakeholders perceive the ability of these instruments to induce systemic change. The results indicate that the current policy mix entails mainly niche support measures and that its transformational power is relatively weak; to strengthen it, further measures on single use regime destabilization should be jointly implemented with reuse system building and niche support. However, addressing all three simultaneously may create tensions between different instruments within a policy mix or between policy mixes targeting separate goals. This requires paying more attention to directionality, policy coherence, consistence, and congruence when designing transformative policy mixes.

Transformative mission-oriented innovation policy aims to redirect innovation, but evidence of this directional ability is limited. This paper examines whether transformer missions redirect values reflected by mission-oriented projects. We study the EU Mission ‘Restore our Ocean and Waters’ and use probabilistic topic modelling and thematic analyses to identify, conceptualize, and compare latent values described in 17 policy documents (i.e., strategic layer), 37 mission-oriented projects, and 809 mission-relevant projects (i.e., operational layer). We map how these values changed during the mission launch. The results of this study are ambivalent. On the one hand, the mission launch corresponds with an increase of funded projects of which mission-oriented projects commonly frame efforts towards mission objectives. On the other hand, there is a misalignment between policy and project-level values while the prevalence of project-level values remained largely unaffected by the mission. These mixed results provide a more nuanced understanding of transformer missions’ directional abilities.

The paper addresses tensions in organizing civil society activities in urban sustainability transitions. It argues that these activities need focus to be impactful while also demanding flexibility to remain adaptive. The latter can hardly be achieved by individual organizations alone but requires closer examination of the ecology of organizations in which civil society actors operate. This paper contributes to the literature on the governance of urban sustainability by systematically analyzing this organizational context and its long-term dynamics. Adopting a neo-institutional lens, the paper scrutinizes civil society activities with the ‘institutional work’ approach and sheds light on how the organizational context enables changes therein. The longitudinal case study of the Local Agenda 21 in Augsburg reveals, via a mixed-method approach, how civil society actors navigate tensions by altering their organizational context. Increasing its diversity and complexity in a bottom-up process allowed them to engage in more transformative work.