Environmental Innovation and Societal Transitions最新文献

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.

In this paper, we develop a holistic policy evaluation framework that aims to harness a fuller potential of just transitions. Although appeals for broader understanding of just transitions are becoming louder, applicable frameworks supporting consideration of justice in the planning and evaluation of transition policies are still lacking. The evaluation framework developed integrates the multidimensional understanding of justice more consistently into the consideration of policy intervention points for sustainability transitions. We test and apply the framework to the discussions concerning just food system transitions in Finland. The results show that justice issues deserve attention across all the policy intervention points, but their relative importance differ. A better understanding of the relative importance of justice concerns is critical when designing policy mixes for more active and emancipatory just transitions governance. We close the paper by explicating further avenues for the application and development of the framework.

Over the last two decades, researchers, policymakers, and practitioners have focused on the innovations in the informal sector, particularly grassroots innovations (GI) from low-income countries. Such innovations' diffusion dynamics, however, are uncharted territory. As a result, this paper explores the diffusion of GI from India's informal sector. We chose ten GI and gathered data in ex-situ and in-situ conditions using a case study method. The data is analysed on four parameters of diffusion of innovation (DOI) theory by Rogers. The findings imply that the GI provide sustainable, and a low cost perceived use value while other innovations from the formal sector are either expensive, unavailable, or do not see it as a potentially profitable enterprise. Furthermore, informality vis-à-vis communication and social structure have a significant impact on diffusion of GI. Time dimension may not be as important for the informal sector innovations. The formal sector actors are more involved in dissemination of GI, employing new means. Finally, we discuss how DOI theory may be applied in the informal sector and how it can aid in alleviating GI diffusion concerns.

The geographical understanding of directionality in the literature on mission-oriented innovation systems is still underdeveloped. Therefore, this article reflects on whether the allocation of funding for R&D activities to different places can direct innovation systems in space. A place-based approach to the allocation of funding and its effects on innovation systems is developed to analyze how the German national government allocates funding to the national innovation system for hydrogen technologies. The results show that the allocation of funding considers place-based characteristics and has a range of systemic outcomes, encompassing the clustering of research activities, the specialization of certain places in certain market segments, and the increase of the spatial reach of the national innovation system by integrating left behind places. However, the funding contributes insufficiently to market formation at the local and regional scale, and is contested due to existing alternative routes that the innovation system could take.

The social practices of householders are crucial for the realisation of energy policies, but their political aspects have been overlooked in previous research. The aim of this paper is to deepen the understanding of the possibilities of householders for political participation in energy transitions in the home. By analysing the social practices of householders in a low-energy building, the paper demonstrates that engagement in energy efficiency is hindered by the materiality and a lack of knowledge of - as well as reliability on - the building's energy system. Yet, the householders consider their lack of knowledge as individual responsibilities. While the necessity to form a political agenda stems from the unmet needs for thermal comfort in the individual home, the political agency to change the lack of influence is developed in the collectivity between the householders. The contestation of individual responsibilities brings forward a politicisation and democratisation of the energy transition. The results of this paper thus support the acknowledgement of different forms of political participation in energy transitions to shape future democratic and just energy systems.

Few studies on legitimation of new technologies were able to provide insights into the longitudinal changes in legitimacy outcomes and the social dynamics that underpin such outcomes. Using a novel mixed-methods approach, combining Natural Language Processing with a qualitative text analysis, and drawing on the concept of social cohesion to investigate the social relations among actors, the study offers new insights into the legitimation of cultured meat in Germany. Using 424 newspaper articles, we identify four topics in the public discourse related to cultured meat and positive average sentiment on each topic over the period 2011–2021. Furthermore, we find the actors, groups, and social relations that shape the observed legitimacy outcomes. The empirical findings are used to develop propositions about the role of social cohesion in legitimacy creation. The study paves the way for future studies on social cohesion dynamics in socio-technical change.

Considering that recycling is seldom economically viable, this study analyzes how recycling organizations perceive institutional voids and adapt their business models to propel a transition from waste crisis to establishing waste management services. The analysis is embedded in the sustainability transitions literature and is approached from an institutional void and business model lens. Qualitative research was conducted with 23 organizations in the recycling industry of Lebanon. The main findings revealed that public voids mainly cause constraints with few exceptions of opportunities, whereas some market voids are perceived as constraints at times and opportunities at others, and coping with these voids leads to a convergence of business models. This study contributes to business model adaptation by examining its role in the transition process and to sustainability transitions research by focusing on how niche-level actors introduce waste management services that are otherwise the regime's responsibility.