The impending climate emergency, the Paris agreement and Sustainable Development Goals demand significant transformations in economies and societies. Science funders, innovation agencies, and scholars have explored new rationales and processes for policymaking, such as transformative innovation policy (TIP). Here, we address the question of how to orient the efforts of science, technology, and innovation policy actors to enable transformations. We build on sustainability transitions research and a 4-year co-creation journey of the TIP Consortium to present twelve transformative outcomes that can guide public policy agencies in evaluating and reformulating their projects, programmes, and policies. We illustrate the transformative outcomes in two empirical cases: transitions towards mobility-as-a-service in the Finnish transport system and the emergence of speciality coffee in Colombia. We argue that the twelve transformative outcomes can guide public policy agents to fundamentally transform their ways of thinking and operation in advancing transformative change.
It is generally accepted that the concept of sustainability is not straightforward, but is subject to ongoing ambiguities, uncertainties and contestations. Yet literature on sustainability transitions has so far only engaged in limited ways with the resulting tough questions around what sustainability means, to whom and in which contexts. This paper makes a contribution to this debate by unpacking sustainability in India and Thailand in the context of solar photovoltaic and urban mobility experimentation. Building on a database of sustainability experiments and multicriteria mapping techniques applied in two workshops, the paper concludes that sustainability transition scholarship and associated governance strategies must engage with such questions in at least three important ways. First, there is a need for extreme caution in assuming any objective status for the sustainability of innovations, and for greater reflection on the normative implications of case study choices. Second, sustainability transition scholarship and governance must engage more with the unpacking of uncertainties and diverse possible socio-technical configurations even within (apparently) singular technological fields. Third, sustainability transition scholarship must be more explicit and reflective about the specific geographical contexts within which the sustainability of experimentation is addressed.
Article (Accepted Version) http://sro.sussex.ac.uk Ghosh, Bipashyee and Schot, Johan (2019) Towards a novel regime change framework: studying mobility transitions in public transport regimes in an Indian megacity. Energy Research & Social Science, 51. pp. 82-95.
‘Smart’ imaginaries have been enthusiastically embraced by urban planners and policymakers around the world. Indians are no exception. Between 2015–2018, following national government guidelines to use participatory and inclusive processes, many cities developed proposals for a smart city challenge. Successful proposals received financial and technical support from the national government. We examine the making of the smart city proposal submitted by New Town Kolkata (NTK). We ask how (un)democratic was the making of the proposal, along three aspects: distributive, participatory, and responsive. Based on an analysis of documents and interviews with policymakers and citizens, we find that NTK’s smart city imaginary largely failed to be distributive. It rarely accounted for the specific needs of poorer and vulnerable citizens. City officials invested considerable effort in using participatory techniques, but citizen participation was tightly controlled through top-down design and practice of the techniques. The latter often facilitated one-way flow of information from the city administration to the citizens. The proposal was responsive to some citizens’ voices, but only those belonging to the more affluent classes. A messy diversity of citizens’ voices was thus closed down, as the city officials filtered and cherry-picked citizens’ voices that were well-aligned with the official technocratic vision of ‘global’ smart urbanism. The paper shows how democracy can be put in the service of technocracy, within a rhetoric of citizen participation and social inclusion that embodies smart urbanism.
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