IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/h/spr/crechp/978-981-13-9053-1_8.html
   My bibliography  Save this book chapter

Environment and Social Innovation: Why Technology Never Was the Solution

In: Innovation Beyond Technology

Author

Listed:
  • Dominique Pestre

    (Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales)

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.

Suggested Citation

  • Dominique Pestre, 2019. "Environment and Social Innovation: Why Technology Never Was the Solution," Creative Economy, in: Sébastien Lechevalier (ed.), Innovation Beyond Technology, chapter 0, pages 175-194, Springer.
  • Handle: RePEc:spr:crechp:978-981-13-9053-1_8
    DOI: 10.1007/978-981-13-9053-1_8
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Atsu, Francis & Adams, Samuel, 2021. "Energy consumption, finance, and climate change: Does policy uncertainty matter?," Economic Analysis and Policy, Elsevier, vol. 70(C), pages 490-501.
    2. Tihana Škrinjarić, 2020. "R&D in Europe: Sector Decomposition of Sources of (in)Efficiency," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 12(4), pages 1-21, February.
    3. Wang, Ping & Han, Wei & Kumail Abbas Rizvi, Syed & Naqvi, Bushra, 2022. "Is Digital Adoption the way forward to Curb Energy Poverty?," Technological Forecasting and Social Change, Elsevier, vol. 180(C).

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:spr:crechp:978-981-13-9053-1_8. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.springer.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.