Exploring Citizens’ Adoption of Sustainable Innovations Implemented by Cities and Municipalities in Germany

Abstract

Sustainable innovations, such as sustainable products or services, are becoming increasingly relevant for society and thrive on societies’ knowledge and usage. But this is where many cities/municipalities are experiencing disharmony: citizens often do not know that these sustainable innovations exist and, therefore, do not use them. Our study starts at this point: To address this disharmony in Germany, the government has established the German Sustainability Award, which honors cities/municipalities with outstanding sustainable innovations. We qualitatively surveyed the citizens and administrations of these cities about their knowledge and use in their city/municipality (using eight categories) under the theoretical lens of Rogers’ (1960/2003) Diffusion of Innovation Theory (DOI). In 29 interviews in six cities/municipalities, we were able to match sustainable innovations based on DOI. In particular, we determined that few sustainable innovations were only found in specific categories (such as economy (EC)), while others existed in all (such as climate and environment (CE) or education (ED)), and, e.g., city/municipality’s size did not matter at all.