Environmental Innovation and Societal Transitions最新文献

Transformative social innovation policy encompasses more than the idea that policy defines directions about the expected outcomes of innovation. It also promotes new forms of governance and rationales based on more intersectional and decentralized processes of innovation. Such policy has thus to be studied primarily as a perpetual process of redefinition, rather than as an end in itself to achieve societal missions.

Through an examination of the ‘G'innove’ program implemented by the City of Geneva, we explore how a new social innovation policy can stimulate new types of innovation projects in the city, how these projects can change the established policy rationales of the city, and how innovation policy and policy innovation intertwine in the transformation of society by the city. Beyond this exemplary policy, we attempt to propose complementarities between transformations in, of and by the city in order to promote new policy agendas and rethink their underlying rationales.

In order to reach climate neutrality by 2050 the EU needs to overcome challenges relating to accelerating innovation, creating infrastructure, redirecting investments, and fostering cross-sectoral integration. In this policy brief, we present key policy lessons relating to these four challenges based on seven case studies on transformative policies from the period 2005–2022 in different EU countries. Two themes reappear in many of our lessons. First, policies could be improved if a holistic approach to innovation was taken, with policymakers considering how new (innovative) technologies substitute (or phaseout) old technologies. Second, rather than trying to incentivize firms or citizens through monetary returns, governments could make progress towards climate neutrality by reducing the efforts required from firms and citizens to participate in the carbon neutrality transition, e.g., reducing administrative burdens.

Sustainability transitions research and policy treat households and the home in a narrow way. The paper reviews niche-based experimentation and social-practice theory informed sustainability transitions literature to develop a novel framework for deliberate household experimentation. The usefulness of the framework is explored in an action research project on low-waste living in Melbourne. Data was collected through interviews, weekly self-reports and three participatory workshops. The research confirms the usefulness of the framework and offers reflections on deliberate household experimentation. The conclusion is that similar to other niche spaces, household niches are instrumental in demonstrating, learning about, advocating for and critiquing different aspects of sustainability transitions. But in contrast to other niche spaces, households are deeply embedded in the everyday life of what matters to people. If the transition to low-waste living is to be successful, it needs to be planned from the perspective of everyday household life.

Sustainability transitions research is increasingly engaged with the complexities of justice and equitability. In housing, policy lock-ins and infrastructural inequalities expose people to volatile energy markets, energy poverty and climate impacts. These problems have often been dealt with reactively, without resolving their underlying systemic and structural causes. We examine household energy vulnerabilities, their exposure and sensitivity to certain risks, and what their adaptive capacity is in navigating those. Based on qualitative case studies of social housing in Canada and housing cooperatives in Finland, we show that interconnected exposures and sensitivities to risks are contextual. This can lead to energy vulnerability, further triggered by changes in policies, energy markets and the environment. In Canada, neglected housing maintenance causes exposure, while in Finland, policy utilizing bottom-up action does not always strengthen household agency, especially for vulnerable households. We call for more empirical studies on household energy vulnerability in different contexts.

This paper investigates the development of a mission-oriented innovation policy approach at a national level. The empirical case that forms the core of the paper is a policy process towards shaping future research and innovation policies and priorities in Norway. The concept “mission-oriented research and innovation policy” was introduced in the policy process and steps were initiated to develop and implement missions as a new policy approach to address grand challenges. Based on a narrative case study and interviews with 33 policymakers, the paper illuminates the “inner life” of a policy process and the meanings and actions agents bring to it, and how this shapes policy formulation. The paper draws on policy process theories, and particularly highlights the role of actors, ideas and anchoring, and illustrates how these interrelated elements of a policy process occur both within and across bureaucratic and political arenas.

Experimentation is a key theme in the sustainability transition literature, where cities are recognized as key intermediaries in experimentation. Whilst attention has focused on the role of the cities as intermediary actors, the ways in which municipalities engage in and support experimentation is less known. In a collective case study of four Finnish municipalities, we draw on the transformative innovation policy literature to investigate the experimental policy engagements and the types of transformative outcomes the municipalities aim to influence. The municipalities engaged in socio-technical experimentation, both as regime-based intermediaries and as innovators experimenting with internal processes and tools. Their attention was focused on building and expanding niches, with unlocking regimes seen to be something beyond their scope. We can observe an experimental culture beginning to emerge at the local governance level. Whilst projectification in the public sector has enabled this emergence, it also influences the form and continuity of experimentation.

Resilience is traditionally seen as the capability to bounce back to normal from undesired change, while sustainability transitions research seeks to understand how a radical change can be promoted. This may be seen as a puzzle, not least considering the increasingly frequent combination of both sets of concepts in policy and scholarly approaches. In this article we systematically review scientific publications that combine these concepts. The findings highlight that resilience is an emerging analytical lens, owing especially to perspectives developed within socio-ecological resilience thinking. This internalizes “nature” more explicitly into conceptual and empirical work, not least regarding energy systems. Future research may be related to issues like stability and change and capabilities for various forms of change, but also needs to pay attention to trade-offs emerging from assumptions about normative resilience, and undesirable resilience which may exist or emerge in different phases and places in transitions.

The Circular Economy (CE) is promoted as a sustainable model of economic growth and a quintessential example of a “sustainability mission.” Despite expected co-benefits in job creation, waste reduction and poverty alleviation, the Global South is largely missing from both missions and CE literature. Employing cross-disciplinary insights from environmental policy and the geography of sustainability transitions, this paper documents the diffusion of CE missions and compares CE policy development between the Global North and Global South. Analysing 61 national-level CE strategic policy documents, we focus on the policy levers, CE strategies, materials and sectors. We show that CE mission development is widespread in the Global North and developing in the Global South. Despite linkages to other national-level social and sustainability agendas, CE policy instrument choice shows limited place-sensitivity and geographical variation. Where the Global South is replicating the Global North's CE trajectory, the transformative potential of circularity missions is threatened.

The growing call for public policy to begin addressing more robustly the challenges posed by sustainability transitions puts the onus on researchers to study how new meta-frameworks of transformative innovation policy and accompanying practices are implemented, applied, and received when they travel across different geographies. We discuss this question by tracing debates with reference to geography of sustainability transitions, policy mobility and actor network literatures. A methodological approach to analyse a cross-country policy initiative is developed and examined through three experiments of transformative innovation policy in diverse policy organisations with different missions and in contrasting geographical and professional spaces. The discussion highlights the relevance of building what we call mutable fluid spaces between academics and policy makers and its importance for transferring transformative innovation policy across geographical spaces.¹

Solar photovoltaic and wind power generation is expanding fast globally, fuelled by technological progress and rapid cost reductions. Other renewable power technologies fare much worse: deployment stagnates despite substantial technological progress. Here, we explore why these technologies fall off political agendas although they are improving, proposing that negative cross-technology feedback from more dynamic, faster deployed technologies reduce the legitimacy of laggard technologies. This generates political pressure to cancel or adapt support schemes, which in turn may push the laggard technology to change and become more complementary to the dynamic technologies. We illustrate our propositions with a case study of concentrating solar power (CSP) policy and deployment in three countries. We show how negative legitimacy feedback from the dynamic diffusion of photovoltaics and wind power in the 2010s led to both policy termination and technological adaptation towards complementarity, changing CSP from a generation to a storage and balancing technology.