System Innovation for Sustainability 1

Reviews / Votes

This book is an important contribution to the growing body of knowledge about sustainable consumption and production. It is the first publication to emerge in a series from the European Union-funded SCORE! project, one of the most successful attempts to build a network of academics and practitioners in the field. The first phase of SCORE! focused on disciplinary approaches, and this book consists of papers presented and discussed at the launch meeting in Copenhagen in 2006. SCORE!'s second phase focused on three consumption domains: transportation, housing, and nutrition. Each of these domains will be covered in a separate book; the first, on transportation, has just appeared (Geerken and Borup 2009). Sustainability is an elusive concept, but it gains focus when it is structured along the production-consumption axis. After all, we are all consumers, and by consuming we influence the supply chain. The book approaches this issue from the disciplinary angles of business, design, and consumer and public-policy studies, under the umbrella of a systemic change concept. The business perspective focuses on 'greening the business,' including the supply chain, eco-marketing, and efforts to get green products on retail shelves. Rolf Wustenhagen and Jasper Boehnke present alternative business models for energy, and Peter Wells does so for the automotive industry. Marcus Wagner discusses innovation and the Porter hypothesis, and Frank-Martin Belz contributes a very interesting chapter on sustainable marketing. The design perspective focuses on designing sustainable products, services, and systems, including a lot of creativity and stakeholder involvement. Ursula Tischner writes about social sustainability and radical change and offers results from a sustainable office project. Francois Jegou describes the Emerging Demand for Sustainable Solutions (EMUDE) project, which looked, together with stakeholders, to innovative solutions for daily problems. Chris Ryan describes eco-innovative cities in Australia, and Benny Leong discusses the question of whether a radical systemic shift toward sustainability is possible in China. The answer is that there are glimmers of hope and that the next 15 years will be crucial. In the section on consumer perspectives, Gerd Scholl focuses on product-service systems and on the symbolic meaning conveyed by consumption and embedded in lifestyles and in everyday life. Dario Padovan uses the well-established notion of social capital to describe lifestyles and consumption patterns in the Italian city of Padova, and Irmgard Schultz and Immanuel Stiess address the same issues through a social-ecological approach. Lifestyle differences are important for understanding different consumption patterns, as illustrated in a chapter by Edina Vadovics, from Hungary. The section of the book devoted to policy perspectives focuses on technological innovation (especially system innovations and transition management) and the innovation system approach. Matthias Weber, Klaus Kubeczo, and Harald Rohracher write about system innovations in innovation systems, and Rene Kemp describes transition management and policies in the Netherlands. The chapter by Oksana Mont and Tareq Emtirah describes product-service systems in the context of systemic changes. Each of these four parts consists of individual studies and an overarching review chapter written by the theme's editors that reflects on the drivers, the state of the art, the opportunities, the models of change, and the limitations. A final chapter, authored by Arnold Tukker, summarizes the entire book and offers guidance to change processes and keys to success. This highly structured approach offers a great deal in terms of presenting cutting-edge research, conceptualizations from various perspectives, strategies for change, and policy development. The book even offers perspectives from diverse countries, such as Hungary and China. The question remains, however, how far the notion conveyed by the subtitle (Perspectives on Radical Changes) has been pushed. To effectively tackle climate change, countries need to make deep reductions in both greenhouse gas emissions and global poverty, and the necessary transformations will entail radical changes. This book, however, offers a rather incremental approach that does not critique the prevailing economic growth paradigm or the widespread notion of consumer sovereignty. There is little consideration of life satisfaction and well-being, and the book does not examine the deeper driving forces of boundless consumption. Institutional change and deep learning receive little attention. The policy perspectives of change toward more sustainable systems of consumption and production are somewhat underdeveloped. Social movements are hardly described. Nevertheless, this edited collection offers an excellent state of the art in sustainable consumption and production research. It is an emerging interdisciplinary field of study, and much more remains to be done. The book inspires and calls for a great deal more action and research. Indeed, one offspring is already established - the North American SCORAI network just convened its first workshop (http://www.scorai.org). Motivated by SCORE! but with a different approach, it tackles some of the same issues. -- Philip J. Vergragt, Tellus Institute, Boston, MA Journal of Industrial Ecology 14.1 A global overview of research, experiments, strategies and metrics at all levels of societies. This volume is Part 1 of a series on perspectives on achieving changes toward more sustainable consumption and production societies - calling for radical system-wide innovation. Most of those initiatives are from Europe, Japan, Australia and some from Brazil and other industrialising countries - with few from the USA. This is due to the greater effort and government support in the European Union for sustainability initiatives. One would expect in the next volume more focus on progress in correcting GDP and integrating available indicators on health, education, poverty gaps and the environment (see www.beyond-gdp.eu) and the rapid development of renewable energy which occurred worldwide in 2007 since this Part 1 went to press. This series will become a classic in the growing field of sustainability literature. We will recommend this volume and the forthcoming series as required reading for our Ethical Markets Sustainability Research Group. -- Hazel Henderson, author of 'Ethical Markets: Growing the Green Economy'; President, Ethical Markets Media, LLC