Abstract
As a purposive sustainability transition requires environmental innovation and innovation policy, we discuss potentials and limitations of three dominant strands of literature in this field, namely the multi-level perspective on socio-technical transitions (MLP), the innovation systems approach (IS), and the long-wave theory of techno-economic paradigm shifts (LWT). All three are epistemologically rooted in an evolutionary understanding of socio-technical change. While these approaches are appropriate to understand market-driven processes of change, they may be deficient as analytical tools for exploring and designing processes of purposive societal transformation. In particular, we argue that the evolutionary mechanism of selection is the key to introducing the strong directionality required for purposive transformative change. In all three innovation theories, we find that the prime selection environment is constituted by the market and, thus, normative societal goals like sustainability are sidelined. Consequently, selection is depoliticised and neither strong directionality nor incumbent regime destabilisation are societally steered. Finally, we offer an analytical framework that builds upon a more political conception of selection and retention and calls for new political institutions to make normatively guided selections. Institutions for transformative innovation need to improve the capacities of complex societies to make binding decisions in politically contested fields.
Highlights
The world is in the process of a two-fold ‘socio-ecological transition’ [1,2]
We examined three dominant approaches in innovation theory on a conceptual level with regard to their capacities to contribute to a comprehensive sustainability transition
While evolutionary theorising can be very helpful to understand processes of socio-technical co-evolution, the approaches we analysed all share a crucial shortcoming in that they accept the apolitical conception of selection mechanisms at the core of evolutionary economic theory, which defines the market as the most important selection environment for technological innovations
Summary
The world is in the process of a two-fold ‘socio-ecological transition’ [1,2]. On the one hand, large parts of the world, including the ‘emerging economies’, are enmeshed in a transition from an agrarian, biomass-based economy to an industrial, fossil-energy-driven one. The MLP and its transition management variants apply the Darwinian concepts of variation, selection and retention to the socio-technical evolution of modern societies Regimes are conceived both as retention structures and selection environments for innovations. A literature review covering 386 journal articles concludes that a reason for new ideas not diffusing rapidly through companies may be due to ”overarching structures of markets, patterns of final consumer demand, institutional and regulatory systems and inadequate infrastructures for change” [32] This suggests that—despite its focus on governing the interface between niches and regime—the MLP literature tends to regard the selection mechanisms as naturally given, unquestionable and subject only to modification and management. Niches may be nested within regimes, but transformative innovation requires acknowledgement that their relationship may (or perhaps even must) at some point become antagonistic and requires institutions that are not managerial but political
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