Sustainable Technology Development

Paul Weaver, Leo Jansen, Geert van Grootveld, Egbert van Spiegel, Philip Vergragt

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351283229
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

In the time it takes to read this sentence, about fifteen people will be added to the world's population. Read the sentence again, and there will be thirty. Tomorrow, each of these people will be demanding greater prosperity. Production and consumption are increasing fast but will have to grow even faster in the future to keep up with population growth and a world increasingly divided by inequality. How should we react to these trends? Certainly, many use growth figures to forecast disaster. But there is an alternative vision: one of a sustainable future, in which growth is seen not as a threat, but as the driving force behind innovation. This is the scenario worked out in the Netherlands by Sustainable Technology Development (STD), a five-year programme of research and "learning-by-doing" based on setting up new innovation networks and working with new methods to search for sustainable technological solutions. In order to make sustainability tangible, STD made a leap in time. What human needs will have to be satisfied fifty years from now? Taking a sustainable future vision as a starting point, STD demonstrated what steps we should take today for new technologies and systems to be in place in time. These results are now available for the first time in a comprehensive, specifically written English-language book, together with a description of the unique working method of STD and the results and key lessons from a set of the programme's illustrative case studies. This book serves as a manual for industry, governments and social leaders wanting to prepare themselves for a sustainable future. Sustainable Technology Development sets out the programme's underpinning philosophy and describes its approach, methods and findings. Delivering sustainability means finding ways to meet human needs using a fraction of the natural resources we use today. The world's richer nations would be wise to target at least ten-fold improvements by 2050 in the productivity with which conventional natural resources and environmental services are used. And they need to bring new, sustainable resources on-stream to augment the resource base and replace the use of unsustainable alternatives. Sustainable Technology Development marks a significant contribution to our understanding of innovation processes and how these might be influenced in favour of sustainable technology development. In principle, technology could play a pivotal role in sustainable development. Whether it does or not depends on whether innovators can be encouraged to make this an explicit goal, adopt long-term time-horizons and search for renewable technologies. Given the long lead-times involved, there is no time to waste in beginning the search. The STD programme has begun to make inroads into one of the most urgent of all needs concerning sustainable development: that for innovation in the innovation process itself.

Part 1

Chapter 1
Capacity-building for sustainable technology development and innovation

This book presents a review and evaluation of the Dutch National Inter-Ministerial Programme for Sustainable Technology Development (STD), which has recently completed its five-year term and is now part-way through a follow-up dissemination phase. The programme missions are to demonstrate that sustainable technologies and the conditions needed for their implementation are attainable in principle in the long term—over a time-horizon of 30–50 years—and to design, test and disseminate innovation-enhancing methods and tools that should be used now to facilitate their timely development. The programme also seeks to foster the co-evolution of technology and the structural and cultural conditions needed for successful technology diffusion, especially by stimulating stakeholder participation in the technology development process. The programme is unusual in that it represents a systematic attempt to influence long-term innovation contexts in favour of achieving a specific societal goal—sustainability—rather than to advance or influence the management of a specific technology. The programme has operationalised a method, which integrates and applies a set of tools, including ‘backcasting’, the ‘factor’ concept, life-cycle assessment, Constructive Technology Assessment and ‘social niche management’. Most of these tools were available before, but they have not previously been integrated and used systematically in the innovation context. Five years on, the programme can claim to have improved innovation contexts, processes and prospects, directly and indirectly, in relation to several key areas of anticipated future need. It has also contributed, more generally, to building a learning society and learning enterprises. Efforts will continue within the Netherlands to embed these programme successes and to monitor the longer-term effectiveness of the programme beyond its existing term. Meanwhile, other countries and regional blocs are showing interest in developing comparable programmes. In this context, important transferable lessons can be drawn from the STD programme and its experiences.

Innovation Practices and Sustainable Technology

The STD programme was established with the ambition of bringing about fundamental changes in innovation practices. It arose from an inquiry by the Dutch Commission for Long-Term Environmental Policy (CLTM) into the role of technology in achieving sustainability, whose main conclusion—that usual innovation practices offer no prospect of technology playing anything other than a peripheral role in achieving sustainable development—was one of enormous significance. It even cast doubt over the feasibility of ever achieving sustainability. Central to the conclusion was the scale of the mismatch—at that time still not quantified, but believed to be large—between the societal and technological challenge represented by sustainability and the magnitude of the expected contribution to attaining sustainability that present-day innovation practices could bring. In effect, usual innovation practice was declared incapable of delivering technologies and business plans compatible with sustainability (CLTM 1990).

The limitations of usual innovation practices are due mostly to a preoccupation with existing technologies and with making incremental improvements to these. Incrementalism is deep-rooted in usual innovation processes, especially in defining aspects such as the specification of technological problems and challenges, the specification of search domains and the specification of the relevant actors to be included in the social networks searching for solutions. Generally, specifications surrounding the innovation process are too restrictive and compartmentalised to enable path-breaking solutions to be identified, explored and implemented. Search tends to be confined to existing definitions of both problems and solutions and is carried out by members of existing networks of actors whose foundations are generally rooted in established technologies and whose interests are vested in them. In turn, this characteristic narrowing of definitions and domains owes partly to inertia and partly to the nature of the external and internal incentives that innovators face. Financial criteria and short-termism dominate usual innovation practice¹ and are institutionalised within enterprises, which are the chief custodians of R&D resources and play the leading role in technological innovation (see Chapter 3 for a fuller review).

However, this diagnosis of why usual innovation practices are generally incapable of delivering sustainable technologies also provides opportunity. The conclusion of the CLTM inquiry was not that technology per se would be incapable of playing a major role in the achievement of sustainability or that technologies capable of delivering substantial resource productivity improvements are not, in principle, feasible. On the contrary, members of the inquiry panel were convinced about the possibilities of developing and implementing sustainable technologies. Their concern—reflected in their conclusion—was that usual innovation processes and practices would not lead automatically to technologies compatible with sustainable development. To change the situation, a substantial effort would be needed to try to influence long-term research, technology development and innovation practices in the direction of sustainability. This would depend on developing, testing and diffusing a guiding methodology for ‘sustainable technology development’.

The Nature and Scale of the Challenge

Following the CLTM report, a feasibility study was commissioned to define more precisely the nature of the challenge to technology and innovation posed by sustainability and how to tackle it. The feasibility study was set up on the joint initiative of five Dutch ministries: Housing, Physical Planning and the Environment; Agriculture, Nature Protection and Fisheries; Transport, Public Works and Water Management; Economic Affairs; and Education and Science. One part of the study, undertaken by the Advisory Council for Research on Nature and the Environment (RMNO), used an approach based on translating the principles of sustainability outlined in the Brundtland Report (WCED 1987)² into quantitative estimates of average per capita annual entitlements to resources and waste emission. The time-horizon for the estimates was 50 years. Two different methods were used for making the translation, but both led to a similar result. Per capita emissions of pollution and consumption of resources need to be reduced, generally to less than 5%–10% of the levels experienced in industrialised societies today. The needed reductions for countries such as the Netherlands typically range from a factor of 10 to a factor of 50 (Weterings and Opschoor 1992). The estimate of the scale of the implied challenge coincides with estimates made around the same time by other groups, such as the Factor 10 Club (see Chapter 2).

The feasibility study clarified three points. First, it quantified the extent of the challenge implied by sustainability—the need for factor-10 to factor-50 improvements in eco-efficiency. Second, it showed this challenge to be far beyond the range of improvement possible through end-of-pipe technologies and even most ‘environmental’ technologies, which represent process-integrated improvements to the ecoefficiency of current processes and products. The study reported that, typically, these changes to established technologies could be expected to deliver improvements in eco-efficiency of no more than a factor of 2–3. Third, and most importantly, the corollary drawn was that, to have any chance of meeting the technological challenge of sustainability, it may be inadvisable to follow the traditional route of studying present products and processes as a way of identifying areas for improvement. Rather, it may be better to begin by accepting that sustainable technologies will most often consist of path-breaking approaches to meeting needs that are radically different from the solutions we have in place today.

The feasibility study thus introduced a number of programme-defining concepts. For the first time, it defined ‘sustainable technologies’ and differentiated these from ‘end-of-pipe’ approaches and ‘environmental technologies’. Sustainable technologies would be ones capable of meeting ‘needs’ using only a fraction—less than a tenth and maybe only a fiftieth—of the ‘eco-capacity’ used by today’s technologies. Eco-capacity was, itself, introduced as a concept to describe the constraints on the permissible level of resource consumption, ecosystem disruption and pollutant emission that would be consistent with maintaining a stock of environmental capital and a stream of environmental benefits for the use of future generations. The concept of ‘need’ was adopted from the Brundtland Commission’s definition of sustainability (WCED 1987) and its status in innovation practice elevated so that it would be the starting point for innovation processes. This was seen necessary as a means of focusing long-term innovation on strategic issues and of combating the tendency for incrementalism. The factor concept was introduced as a means of operationalising a quantitative goal for reduction in resource use and improvement in eco-efficiency—with progress judged against the benchmark of the demand on eco-capacity made by today’s solutions to meeting needs. The factor approach and benchmarking also make it possible to specify a time-path for ecoefficiency improvement, which can be translated into rates of change and used to monitor progress.

Above all, in order to facilitate a process in which the present situation plays little or no role in long-term innovation, a ‘backcasting’ approach—first introduced into the sustainability arena for end-use-oriented energy systems planning (Goldemberg et al. 1985)—was introduced. Backcasting begins with an attempt to envision an acceptable future system state, which takes into account the status of as many important defining constraints and criteria as possible, including the requirement to meet ‘needs’. This system state is then used as a reference: for tracing pathways back to the present, for placing milestones along those pathways and for identifying short-term challenges and obstacles that will have to be overcome en route. Progress will depend not only on meeting the technological challenges, but also on co-evolutionary developments in policies, markets, attitudes and behaviours. R&D and innovation efforts have to be directed to all of these challenges. Backcasting thus provides a way of connecting the future and the present. It provides a means of translating a long-term vision of a sustainable future into near-term actions consistent both with achieving that future and dealing with the realities of the present situation. It also provides a basis for a co-evolutionary approach to innovation in which the various elements of the developmental system are viewed holistically and dynamically in terms of interrelationships and feedbacks.

Eco-Restructuring and Technological Innovation

Other considerations also contributed to the decision to try to influence innovation practices. Long-term sustainability depends on eco-restructuring to bring the so-called ‘metabolism’ of our societies and economies—the amount and structure of resource use and waste production—within the boundary conditions described by critical eco-capacities and by human capacities to cope with environmental change or to accept it.³ As a process, eco-restructuring implies achieving wide-ranging changes in our societies and economies including, especially, a restructuring of production and consumption patterns both in amount and type. This is an inevitable corollary of the important Ehrlich Identity (Ehrlich and Holdren 1971; Holdren and Ehrlich 1974; Ehrlich et al. 1977; Ehrlich and Ehrlich 1990).⁴ Eco-restructuring also implies cultural and social restructuring, especially of values, motivations and institutions that underlie the criteria used when making production and consumption choices and the importance ascribed to them, and a restructuring of the incentives that people face when evaluating such choices. This has implications also for decisions on how technologies might be designed and how they ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• PART 1
• PART 2
• PART 3
• Bibliography
• Index