4.1 Literature review

The global political agenda of the last 20 years focused on creating economic and regulatory incentives to drive more sustainable industrial development patterns within and between nation states. This is a result of the improved understanding of how innovation interacts with technological, social and ecological systems. The starting point was the first “earth summit” in Stockholm in 1972 and has been an important feature in such debates through to Rio+20 in 2012. What was striking is that hybrid combinations of the counterposing “industrial” and “grassroots” innovation approaches are increasing, because they not only enable more sustainable and socially just ways of doing things, but also disrupt the unsustainable pathways that lead us to “planetary boundaries”. The hybrid innovation approaches are more dynamic, complex and unpredictable than the green industrialization approaches that national governments and intergovernmental negotiations have been used to dealing with.  They entail novel politics, structured by new power relations. Within these new hybrid politics, perennially contentious issues form sites of tension and negotiation within; appropriation, commodification, risk governance, market and nonmarket mechanisms, investment challenges, diverse settings and distributed knowledge.

However, a lack of attention, let alone concessions to processes of empowerment in the outcome document, suggests that “grassroots” innovations approaches remain marginal. Therefore, any hybrid approach is likely to be dominated by incumbent pathways. A new role of future summits is to open up the space for different innovation approaches in ways that ensure the “grassroots” can participate fully and centrally in shaping the 3D implications of any proposed outcomes and actions.

Grassroots form the micro-level. Small market niches or technological niches act as “incubation rooms” shielding new technologies from mainstream market selection. Such protection is needed because new technologies initially have a low price/performance ratio. The macro level is the socio-technological landscape, which forms an exogenous environment that usually changes slowly and influences niche and regime dynamics. The relationship between the landscape, the regimes and the niches is a nested hierarchy or multi-level.

There are four ideal-typical transition pathways, based on different kind of timing and multi-level interactions. Transformation is characterized by external pressure and gradual adjustment and reorientation of existing regimes. Secondly there is reconfiguration, in which niche-innovations are more developed when regimes face problems and external landscape pressures. In response the regime adopts certain niche-innovations into the system as add-ons or component substitutions, leading to a gradual reconfiguration of the basic architecture and changes in some guiding principles, beliefs and practices. Thirdly there is technological substitution in which landscape pressures produce problems and tensions in regimes, which create “windows of opportunity” for niche-innovations, which they can use when they have stabilized and gathered momentum. Lastly, there is dealignment and realignment. Due to major landscape, huge problems in the regime appear. The regime experiences major internal problems, collapses, erodes and de-aligns. Regime actors lose faith in the future of the system. The destabilisation of the regime creates uncertainty about dimensions on which to optimize innovation efforts.