Engaging with the politics of sustainability transitions
Section snippets
Intriguing insights
Considerable advances have been made in appreciating the long term evolution of socio-technical systems. Literatures dealing with socio-economic paradigm shifts (Dosi, 1982, Freeman, 1996, Perez, 2002, Perez, 2008), national systems of innovation (Nelson, 1993, Edquist, 2004, Lundvall, 2010), and functions of innovation systems (Johnson and Jacobsson, 2001, Hekkert et al., 2007) have pointed to the complex interplay among economic, technological, social, and political factors. More
Politics, transitions and sustainable development
Politics is the constant companion of socio-technical transitions, serving alternatively (and often simultaneously) as context, arena, obstacle, enabler, arbiter, and manager of repercussions. Politics (including not just the behaviour of government but also that of other actors) is manifest on each of the three levels of the multi-level perspective. At the landscape level it influences the general economic climate (growth or stagnation, free trade or protection), the orientation of innovation
Pity the poor politicians
It is easy to castigate political leaders for short-sighted decisions and their failure to get to grips with sustainability. But transforming the societal development trajectory is necessarily a long, messy and painful process. The short-term focus of prevailing arrangements (electoral cycles, voter attention span, planning horizons) is often criticized. Yet there are good reasons why we keep politicians coming back for renewed mandates every four years, and why democracies hesitate to commit
Interrogate the politics
Precisely because politics plays a potentially powerful role (defining the landscape, propping up or destabilising regimes, protecting or exposing niches), it requires explicit attention from those interested in understanding sustainability transitions. And there has, for example, been some discussion of the political dimensions of the Dutch ‘energy transition’ (Kemp et al., 2007b, Kern and Smith, 2008, Kern and Howlett, 2009).
One way to approach the politics of sustainability transitions is
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