Andreas Stamm Eva Dantas Doris Fischer Sunayana ... - ETH Zürich

Sustainability-oriented innovation systems
Summary
At the beginning of the new Millennium, the world is faced with a normative dilemma:
While the goal of a fast poverty reduction would call for higher economic growth rates in
most of the developing world, more dynamic growth would increase pressure on the natural
environment if growth patterns are not significantly altered. The paper argues that to
reconcile various development goals, ways have to be found to effectively decouple economic
growth from environmental pressure, in ways that allow for high value addition and
welfare creation, while at the same time minimising the impact on the resource base and
sink capacities of the environment.
There is no empirical evidence that this decoupling might occur automatically as economies
and societies mature, as postulated by the environmental Kuznets curve. The transition
from an economy based mainly on industrial activities towards a service economy
might reduce resource consumption and emissions in one country, but this will most often
mean simply externalising environmental costs, with manufactured goods being imported
from other countries or world regions. Nor is it possible to identify any generalised transition
towards post-materialist values that could mitigate the pressures on the environment,
and there is no reason to expect this, either, as long as many human beings continue to
struggle to escape absolute poverty.
Policy is needed to achieve effective decoupling, and technology development and deployment
will have to play a crucial role. Innovations are often directly related to improved
environmental performance, e.g. in connection with increased energy efficiency of
processes and reduced product material requirements. However, technology-driven improvements
in resource productivity have thus far been outpaced by economic growth,
even in world regions with strong innovation systems and relatively low growth rates,
such as the European Union (EU). What this means is that overall resource and energy
consumption has not decreased. Thus, technological innovations need to be developed at a
higher rate and translated into practice at a quicker pace. And their impact on resource
efficiency needs to be enhanced significantly.
What is called for to achieve this is determined efforts that involve not only the traditional
technological powerhouses in the North but also the developing countries. A special role
will have to be played by a number of large anchor countries, first of all Brazil, China,
India and South Africa. On the one hand, they have developed a rather large ecological
footprint, e.g. due to large-scale and coal-based energy production or extensive deforestation.
On the other hand, they have built up relatively high levels of technological capability.
While technology transfer will have to play an important role in innovation-driven decoupling
efforts, this instrument must be embedded in more comprehensive strategies.
These will have to involve efforts to strengthen technological capabilities in the anchor
countries as well as joint Research and Development (R&D) efforts between industrialised
and developing countries. There are three main factors that explain why technology transfer
is only part of the solution:
− First, technology transfer can only be effective where a reasonable degree of technological
capability is already in place.
German Development Institute / Deutsches Institut für Entwicklungspolitik (DIE) 1