Innovation and institutional change: the transition to a sustainable ...

Conclusions 219
typical example of converging strategies actors mobilising their power and
resources to realise their interests, but our main point is that a sequence of
changes has to be set in motion before it becomes cognitively clear for actors
what those interests may be and how they may be realised in a different way.
Moreover, also gas and electricity prices developed favourable for decentral
cogeneration. Consequently the new institutional logics started to take root,
and a set of assumptions, beliefs, and values became more and more taken
for granted by a range of actor groups, each being able to define institutional
logics as being congruent with their own motives, goals and values. For
government it became the most efficient and effective way to realise energy
saving and reduce carbon emissions while also increasing industrial
competitiveness; for many industries it was a way to reduce costs and
dependency upon conditions of power producers, improve their
environmental profile and realise energy saving targets negotiated with
government; NGOs saw energy saving as a step in a process towards more
fundamental changes in energy production and consumption; and
distributors saw it as a way to realise environmental targets and develop own
production capacity relative to power producers. The essence of effective
institutional logics is illustrated here: each actor group can find their own
motivation and reasons to embrace a particular concept, enabling
institutional arrangements to emerge, adapt and solidify according to the
evolving new institutional logics. The essence is also that this is not a pure
rational process in the sense that actors can exactly calculate the costs and
benefits of implementing decentral cogeneration. In the case of companies,
for example, most firms do not routinely assess alternatives for power
generation, but do more or less routinely pay their electricity bills. This is
similar to findings regarding the way companies make decisions on
production processes and led to the famous statement of Porter and van der
Linde (1995): companies leave hundred dollar notes lying around without
even noticing them. Cleaner production projects and evaluations have
confirmed this (De Bruijn and Hofman, 1998; 1999; 2000; 2002; Dieleman,
1999). Dieleman (1999) pointed at companies being ‘blinded’ for waste
prevention opportunities and argued that confrontation was one way of
opening up existing practices within firms. In the case of cogeneration,
opening up of companies took place because they were informed about the
concept and its logics by their association, by companies in their supply
chain, by consultancies confronting them with the hundred euro electricity
notes lying around on the floor, by intermediaries such as the Cogen office
and Novem, and by media, such as newspapers, professional magazines,
reporting the virtues of cogeneration. The message was almost the same
from all these actors: cogeneration can be profitable for you, is easy
manageable (or we can manage it for you as the distributor could say), and