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268 P. Ekins international bodies and policy makers at both international and national levels call for major changes in most aspects of contemporary resource use and interactions with the natural environment. To give just one example, in 2005 the Synthesis Report of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MEA) concluded: “The challenge of reversing the degradation of ecosystems while meeting increasing demands for their services ... involve significant changes in policies, institutions, and practices that are not currently under way.” (MEA 2005, p.1) The scale of the changes that seem to be envisaged goes well beyond individual technologies and artefacts, and involves system innovation through what the literature calls ‘a technological transition’. However, clearly it is not just any technological transition that is being advocated in response to these challenges, but one that greatly reduces both environmental impacts and the use of natural resources. The innovation that could lead to such a transition has been variously called environmental or eco-innovation, with a key role for environmental technologies. The European Union has adopted an Environmental Technologies Action Plan (ETAP), 1 and in May 2007 the European Commission published a report (CEC 2007) on trends and developments in eco-innovation in the European Union, which confirmed the strong growth of environmentally related industries, also called ecoindustries, while emphasising that the state of the environment and climate change call for the take-up of clean and environmentally-friendly innovation “on a massive scale”, 2 and proposing “a number of priorities and actions that will raise demand for environmental technologies and eco-innovation”. Similarly, the Background Statement for the OECD Global Forum on Environment on Eco-innovation 3 in November 2009 declares: “Most OECD countries consider eco-innovation as an important part of the response to contemporary challenges, including climate change and energy security. In addition, many countries consider that eco-innovation could be a source of competitive advantages in the fast-growing environmental goods and services sector.” Similarly the goal of ETAP was explicitly to achieve a reduction in resource use and pollution from economic activity while underpinning economic growth. This linkage between environmental challenge and economic opportunity recurs throughout discussion of eco-innovation. Section 2 considers both the nature of eco-innovation, while Section 3 discusses how it might be measured. Section 4 looks at some developments in the eco-industries in Europe. The development of eco-industries is driven by public policies. Section 5 looks at the kinds of environmental policies that have been implemented and presents some evidence as to which have been most effective. What is clear is that the introduction of such policies has been and continues to be contested. However, it is also the case that there is little to be gained environmentally if such policies simply result in the relocation of such industries to parts of the world that do not introduce them. This illustrates the importance of global agreements if countries are to be able to stimulate environmental innovation without loss of competitive advantage. 1 See the ETAP website at http://ec.europa.eu/environment/etap/actionplan_en.htm. 2 See http://ec.europa.eu/environment/news/brief/2007_04/index_en.htm#ecoinnovation. 3 See http://www.oecd.org/document/48/0,3343,en_2649_34333_42430704_1_1_1_37465,00.html.
Eco-innovation for environmental sustainability 269 2 A technological transition through eco-innovation Technologies do not exist, and new industries and technologies are not developed, in a vacuum. They are a product of the social and economic context in which they were developed and which they subsequently help to shape. The idea of a technological transition therefore implies more than the substitution of one artefact for another. It implies a change from one techno-socio-economic system (or ‘socio-technical configuration’ as it is called below) to another, in a complex and pervasive series of processes that may leave little of society unaffected. There is now an enormous literature on technological change and the broader concept of technological transition, ranging from relatively simple descriptions of the way technologies are developed and diffused in society in terms of ‘technologypush/market-pull’ (e.g. Foxon 2003; Carbon Trust 2002), to theories that emphasise transition management and the co-evolution of socio-economic systems (e.g. Freeman and Louça 2001; Bleischwitz 2004, 2007; Nill and Kemp 2009) and multi-level interactions between technological niches and socio-technical regimes and landscapes (Geels 2002a, b). These theories are discussed in some detail in Ekins 2010 (forthcoming), and see the papers by Kemp and Walz (this issue). However such changes are conceptualised, to achieve the radical improvements in environmental performance that are required they will need to be driven by processes of innovation that emphasise the environmental dimension, which have variously been called eco-, or environmental, innovation. Innovation is about change. Moreover, in the economics literature it always means positive change, change which results in some defined economic improvement. Similarly, in respect of the environment, environmental innovation means changes that benefit the environment in some way. In the ECODRIVE project (Huppes et al. 2008) the now much-used term ‘eco-innovation’ was defined as a sub-class of innovation, the intersection between economic and environmental innovation, i.e. “eco-innovation is a change in economic activities that improves both the economic performance and the environmental performance of society” (Huppes et al. 2008, p.29). In other words, Economic Performance Absolute Deterioration R Eco- Innovation Environmental Performance R = Reference for comparison Fig. 1 Eco-innovation as a sub-class of innovation
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