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

220 Chapter 8
contributes to a better environment. After starting to take in the information,
maybe finally after discussing informally with another business in a local
meeting, companies may either take a look at calculation tools of the Cogen
office or rely on the advice of experts. A set of regulative pressures (energy
saving agreements), normative mechanisms (environmentally sound
behaviour, trust of association), and cognitive mechanisms (repetition of
similar messages and understanding about the way things are going to be
done on our branch), start to synchronise and stepwise reaches companies
with higher thresholds for adoption.
The emergence of green electricity in the energy system in the Netherlands
triggered a sequence of events and changes in the Dutch electricity system.
The interlocking of changes in institutional arrangements within the
electricity sector and with broader political and societal structures created
the foundation for the concept. The case showed that the mobilisation of
actors under the right conditions can create strong drivers for change, but
also underlined the difficulty to direct these driving forces in a sustainable
direction towards fundamental change of systems of production and
consumption. A crucial process explaining the emergence was the way
institutional change within the electricity sector became aligned with
institutional change in environmental policy making. The initial concept had
relatively strong sustainability features, based on newly installed domestic
renewable facilities, but as the concept travelled to other organisations these
features became weaker and weaker. While the concept initially co-evolved
with domestic sustainability policy, co-evolution with European
liberalisation policy became gradually dominant, and was initiated by the
rather short-sighted liberalisation of green electricity. The initially more
fundamental principles still guide individual companies, but lost their
leverage for the market as a whole. The success of green electricity,
understood as increasing alignment between various groups of actors and
their product and marketing strategies, policy strategies, and consumption
behaviour, is based on the emergence and spread of a particular institutional
logics which became interwoven with the new practice. The consumer as
change agent was a new and catching concept perceived by various actor
groups as good for the economy, policy, and society.
Overall, the way the electricity system is embedded in society has
fundamentally changed. The reduction of legitimacy and credibility of the
central station electricity system has initially led to de-institutionalisation of
its linkages to wider fields in society. Instead a more demand-oriented
electricity system biased towards cogeneration and green electricity gained
legitimacy and was supported by institutional changes. The process of
liberalisation however has set in motion diverging processes. On the one
hand, a re-institutionalisation of the central station electricity system has