Environment and Social Innovation: Why Technology Never Was the Solution

Dominique Pestre ()
Additional contact information
Dominique Pestre: Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales

Chapter Chapter 8 in Innovation Beyond Technology, 2019, pp 175-194 from Springer

Abstract: Abstract For environmental protection, innovation in products and processes is often seen as the ideal solution. Contributing to economic activity while being ‘environmentally friendly’, it tends to have the favour of all, notably industry and governments. This paper takes the question of environmental protection from another angle and claims that it mainly relies on other kinds of tools than technical innovation—namely compensation schemes, norms, spatial zoning, Environmental Impact Assessments, economic instruments, management techniques, audits, lifecycle analysis, labels, etc. These tools are political, economic and legal in nature and they aim at controlling technical progress and its unwanted, negative side effects. Considering day-to-day usages of these tools, how they are concretely deployed, the compromises that define them, and the actors who mobilize them, it leads to an image that is less optimistic than the one often associated with innovation and green technologies. What it shows is the gap between claims and results, and the fact that these tools do not lead to serious reductions of environmental problems—the key reason being the unwillingness to alter growth and development, to transform our modes of production and our ways of life.

Date: 2019
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

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:spr:crechp:978-981-13-9053-1_8

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/9789811390531

DOI: 10.1007/978-981-13-9053-1_8

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Creative Economy from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().