Ideas, Institutions, and Interests: Explaining Policy Divergence in Fostering ‘System Innovations’ towards Sustainability

Florian Kern
Additional contact information
Florian Kern: Science and Technology Policy Research, University of Sussex, Brighton BN1 9QE, England

Environment and Planning C, 2011, vol. 29, issue 6, 1116-1134

Abstract: Over the last few years a fast-growing literature has developed around the notion of sociotechnical transitions and the possibilities for governing ‘system innovations’ towards sustainability. Government policies are assumed to play an important role in such processes. However, an important critique has suggested not to see these transition processes as politically neutral but to pay more attention to the politics of these processes. With this paper I make a contribution towards this debate by analysing the underlying political processes and their institutional contexts which led to two quite different approaches aimed at promoting system innovations in the UK and the Netherlands. The main question I answer is why the two governments engage with the same challenge in such different ways. Building on a discursive – institutionalist perspective based on the work of Hajer and Schmidt, I highlight the interplay of discourses, institutional contexts, and interests in shaping policy initiatives to promote system innovations. I conclude by suggesting a typology of possible relationships between these variables and expected policy outputs which helps to explain the two case studies and is believed to be applicable more widely.

Date: 2011
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1068/c1142 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:envirc:v:29:y:2011:i:6:p:1116-1134

DOI: 10.1068/c1142

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Environment and Planning C
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().