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Shaping System Innovation: Transformative Environmental Policies

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New Developments in Eco-Innovation Research

Part of the book series: Sustainability and Innovation ((SUSTAINABILITY))

Abstract

The paper explores if and how sustainability transformations are shaped by incremental environmental policies. Theories of transformation are rather pessimistic about possibilities to actually steer transformations to sustainability: political actors are considered as incumbents that would maintain the given regime or as being an object of transformation rather than protagonists of transformational change. Transformation is considered as a result of systemic, co-evolutionary processes from bottom up initiatives instead of purposeful governmental steering. In some contributions, there are calls for holistic, long term and integrated strategies, however, these disregard the actual capacities of states. The analysis of the dynamics of past transformations of societal systems does, however, open up options for governance in the context of transformation. The notion of niches and experimentation as starting points of transformations, the role of visions for accelerating transformation, the concept of actorness in transformation and the management of phase out of technologies and practices (exnovation) can build on experiences and examples of incremental environmental policies. Based on the analysis of theories of transformation on the one hand and theories of incremental policymaking on the other hand, a concept of transformative environmental policy is elaborated.

The contribution is based on an extended concept for transformative environmental policies developed in Jacob et al. (2018) (forthcoming). The author is grateful to Louise Fitzgerald for commenting an earlier version.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Freie Universität Berlin, Forschungszentrum für Umweltpolitik (ffu), Berlin, Germany

    Klaus Jacob

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  1. Klaus Jacob
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Correspondence to Klaus Jacob .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Business, Augsburg University of Applied Sciences, Augsburg, Germany

    Jens Horbach

  2. Centre for European Economic Research (ZEW), Mannheim, Germany

    Christiane Reif

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Jacob, K. (2018). Shaping System Innovation: Transformative Environmental Policies. In: Horbach, J., Reif, C. (eds) New Developments in Eco-Innovation Research. Sustainability and Innovation. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93019-0_4

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