Making Serious Inroads into Achieving Global Climate Goals: Disrupting Innovation Driven by Governmental Regulatory Targeting, Not Slow Guided Incremental Innovation Involving Incumbents is What is Needed 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 co-evolutionary processes, guided by government and relevant stakeholders. However, these processes are acknowledged to require decades to achieve their intended changes, a timeframe that is too long to adequately address 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.