Making Serious Inroads into Achieving Sustainable Development: Is Strategic Niche Management/Transition Management Sufficient to Transform the Industrial State?

Abstract

Strategic Niche Management and Transition Management have been promoted as useful avenues to pursue in order to achieve both specific product or process changes and system transformation by focusing on technology development through evolutionary and coevolutionary processes, guided by government and relevant stakeholders. However, these process are acknowledged to require decades to achieve their intended changes, a timeframe that is too long for many of the environmental and social issues we are facing. An approach that involves incumbents and does not consider targets that look beyond reasonably foreseeable technology is likely to advance a model where incumbents evolve rather than being replaced or displaced. Sustainable development requires both disruptive technological and institutional changes, the latter including stringent regulation, integration beyond coordination of disparate goals, and changes in incentives to enable new voices to contribute to integrated systems and solutions. This paper outlines options for a strong governmental role in setting future sustainability goals and the pathways for achieving them.