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Societal transformations

Societal transformations. Presentation 5 Environment and Sustainable Development course UNU-MERIT PhD programme. René Kemp UNU-MERIT, ICIS, DRIFT. Sustainability benefits may be secured through sociotechnical transformations involving system innovation

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Societal transformations

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  1. Societal transformations Presentation 5 Environment and Sustainable Development course UNU-MERIT PhD programme René Kemp UNU-MERIT, ICIS, DRIFT

  2. Sustainability benefits may be secured through sociotechnical transformations involving system innovation • Are green system innovations easier for countries that go through a transformation?

  3. System Innovation • System innovations involve a new logic (guiding principle) and new types of practices (at the supply and user side). • Through system innovation a service is offered in a novel way or altogether new services are offered. Innovation System • An innovation system is constituted by elements and relationships which interact in the production, diffusion and use of new and economically useful knowledge (Lundvall, 1992). A further distinction is between national, sectoral and regional systems of innovation.

  4. Socio-technical change • Socio-technical change is the outcome of processes that can be identified at different levels: micro, meso and macro • The story of change: (1) Most innovation is incremental and part of a technological regime, radical change occurs rarely

  5. Socio-technical change (2) • At the micro level there is variety but the variety is bounded due to competition and to advantages of standardization but also bounded by self-assumed roles, routines and shared assumptions and beliefs – that form a cognitive and normative framework (a regime) which channels investment and imagination into particular directions

  6. Socio-technical change (3) • The transformation of regimes and landscapes

  7. Increasing Landscape structuration of activities in local practices Patchwork of regimes Niches (novelty) Multi-level perspective on system- innovation Geels (2002, 2004)

  8. Markard (2006) SSI =Sectoral systems of innovation (Malerba) TIS = Technology-specific innovation systems (Jacobsson)

  9. What is a regime? • A regime may be defined in terms of knowledge and technology (internal combustion vehicle regime) • in terms of a practice: automobility, massproduction • In terms of the central institution or type of coordination: world trade agreement, IPR, system of control measures (product testing, occupational safety, health, ..)

  10. Alignment of ongoing processes in a socio-technical regime Geels (2005)

  11. Geels (2005)

  12. The strength of the multi-level framework • is that innovation and transition processes can be explained by the interplay of stabilizing mechanisms at the regime level and (regime-) destabilizing influences or pressures at the landscape level combined with the emergence of radical innovations at the niche level

  13. Regimes should be operationalised • Regimes are empirically vague: The conceptual issue of how to define a regime empirically has received only scant attention • When can we call something a regime? • How to deal with variations of products, actor strategies, markets within a regime conceptually? • How to measure grammar and rules sets?

  14. An example of a regime • The automobility regime with its various regimes • Internal combustion engine • Car-ownership and self-driving • Professional servicing • Massproduction • Each of which can be called a regime

  15. How does a regime look?What are key elements?Can they be observed empirically?

  16. I would define regimes in terms of • Dominant practices (at supply and user side) • Self-assumed roles • Dominant ways of thinking (basic assumptions, problem definitions, favoured approaches for dealing with problems) • Which are being reproduced

  17. Questions • An important question for policy is whether sustainability transformations can be identified and implemented. What capacities and circumstances are needed for transformations to occur? • Is the capacity for green transformations in developing countries less than it is in developed countries? If so, what are the reasons for this? Is this because of the lack of markets (which causes agents to adapt) or the lack of certain capabilities?

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