Environmental innovations and policy network styles: The influence of pluralism and corporativism

Abstract

The increasing awareness of sustainability issues in industrialized countries has resulted in an unprecedented rise in the number of environmental innovations produced worldwide. However, while this is a general tendency, the amount and importance of environmental innovations is far from consistent across industrialized countries. The influence of countries’ policy network styles – referring to which and how interest groups participate in making public policy choices is a dimension that has been subject to growing interest and controversy. We propose that companies from pluralistic countries will generate more environmental innovations, but the importance of environmental innovations will be higher in neo-corporatist countries. Our analysis, based on a longitudinal analysis of 84,274 environmental patents from the United States, Japan, Germany, and the UK during the period 1976–2003, indicates support for our prediction that neo-corporatist countries tend to generate more important environmental innovations than pluralistic countries. Yet, our findings do not support our hypothesis suggesting that pluralistic countries are more likely to generate a higher number of environmental innovations.