Green Urban Transport Policies and Cleantech Innovations: Evidence from Curitiba, Göteborg and Hamburg

Abstract

Facing climate change challenges, many local governments worldwide became active deploying green urban transport policies (GUTP). By doing so, their central objective was to curb CO2 emissions and manage the latent tension between accessibility, mobility and quality of life. However, in some cases, those policies indirectly foster the localized development of cleantech innovations. In this paper, we analyse in-depth the mechanisms through which this phenomenon takes place. Combining literatures from innovation studies and economic geography, we ground our analysis on the experiences of three cities active in GUTP: Curitiba (Brazil), Göteborg (Sweden) and Hamburg (Germany). We start by framing the emergence and development of GUTP within a co-evolutionary context. Subsequently, for each case, we decompose the relevance of GUTP in providing a mix of incentives to cleantech innovation processes: (i) levering technological exploration; (ii) providing room for experimentation and testing and (iii) creating ground for exploitation and demonstration of new technologies. We illustrate how GUTP can foster rich processes of localized learning, but also support local anchoring and diffusion of cleantech mobile knowledge.