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

Andreas Stamm et al.
ades, the fast development of CCS (carbon capture and storage) technologies seems to be
a clear imperative that could call for a well-coordinated and -funded global mission involving
all R&D and innovation actors that may be able to provide the knowledge and
expertise required to enable a quick technological breakthrough.
In any case, providing the required decoupling solutions calls for new and concerted international
action in science, technology and innovation, clearly not limited to the industrialised
countries of the North but also involving actors in the developing world, and here first
of all anchor countries that have accumulated technological capabilities and are striving to
catch up technologically with the OECD world.
How global sustainability challenges can be addressed by national and multilateral innovation
policies is still a largely open question. This can partly be explained by a failure of the
research community to adequately inform policy makers. This, in turn, is largely due to a
division of the research community as such into those researchers that deal with technological
innovation and innovation systems on the one hand and those that deal with environmental
challenges and the effectiveness of environmental policies on the other:
— Innovation (system) research, on the one hand, has for too long largely neglected the
pressing challenges of sustainable development, essentially limiting the scope of research
to the features of innovation systems that contribute to the competitiveness of
national economies, mainly in advanced industrialised economies.
— Researchers concerned with the preservation of the global environment, on the other
hand, have largely ignored the potential power of technological innovations for reconciling
the need to satisfy socio-economic needs with need to preserve global ecosystems.
Far too often, the discourse has centred on possible threats that specific technologies
(such as genetic engineering) may imply for ecosystems.
In Chapter 5 of this paper, we outlined a rather challenging research agenda that might
provide answers to the question how economic growth and social progress might be decoupled
from environmental pressures, especially in anchor countries. Carrying out this
research agenda will make it necessary to bring together three research and discourse
communities, namely IS researchers with researchers dealing with the mitigation of environmental
problems and, finally, the development research community.
— IS research can explain how technological and innovation capabilities within a sector
or country are shaped through the interplay of actors from the private and the public
sector, governed by rules and regulations largely influenced by policies.
— Environment-related research can shed light on what the most pressing challenges are
in relation to the environmental dimension of sustainability and thus also in the areas
in which technological solutions would be essential to mitigate them.
— Development research can contribute knowledge regarding the level of complexity at
which the development and deployment of environmentally sound technologies has to
be conceptualised - at the micro-level of the firm or local community, at the mesolevel
of organisations, at the macro-level of policies and polities, and finally at the
meta-level of the rules and norms prevalent in a given developing society.
While the links between the environmental and development communities are relatively
firm, and some links exist between the IS and development communities, the main challenge
seems to lie in bringing, first, the environmental and IS communities and then all
three communities together with a view to exploiting the synergies between them.
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German Development Institute / Deutsches Institut für Entwicklungspolitik (DIE)