Revising Boundaries of the Process of Environmental Innovation to Prevent Climate Change

Mainstream economics and international institutions assert that environmental innovations and market-based drivers provide solutions to prevent climate change and cope with the challenges of COP21. Our paper questions this postulate by analyzing each step of the process of environmental innovation from a systemic approach. We focus especially on eco-design, environmental innovation and its dissemination in the sociotechnical landscape. By analyzing seminal literature, we demonstrate that the beacon of hope for technical change is highly compromised and cannot be considered as a deus ex machina. We show that economic boundaries are taking over the biosphere with market-based governance, and this is unable to prevent climate change. It creates incremental effects and even contributes to rebound effects at a macrosystemic level. Everything also depends on complex institutional drivers based on collective dilemmas such as local versus global scaling and short-term versus long-term scaling. Moreover, the disconnection between eco-design and environmental innovation theory demonstrates that the pluridisciplinarity between social and technical science is necessary to manage the climate change challenge. Finally, preventing or adapting to climate change is therefore not only a technical challenge, but also the milestone for a sustainable transition based on the human activity sphere, including institutions and political issues.