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

230 Chapter 8
and decentral cogeneration. Instead of a focus on foremost technological
paths the focus should also be on the way to provoke, support and further
promising institutional arrangements.
Suggestion 3: Support promising emerging institutional arrangements
Support systems could be broadened through support for alternative concepts
and associated institutional arrangements. Current examples are the
development of a certification system for sustainable biomass trade
(Junginger and Faaij, 2005); experiments with distributed generation models
(Cogen, 1999; Hofman and Marquart, 2001: 166); and the development of
local sustainable energy boards.
8.6 Epilogue: transition to a sustainable electricity
system
This final section comes back to the introduction of this book where we
described different approaches to the way systems change towards
sustainability may unfold. The five approaches identified were the
engineering approach, business approach, cultural approach, technological
approach and governance approach. We proposed that elements from all
approaches need to be combined for the transition to sustainability. Two
final questions then leave their mark. A first question is whether we see
integration of the various approaches in the unfolding paths and policies in
the electricity system; and a second question is whether these approaches
and their integration are specific to the electricity system of production and
consumption or part of more broad societal processes of change.
We suggest that policy and paths in the electricity system are currently
dominated by the technological and business approaches and a limited
governance approach. The focus on technology is visible in the way certain
technological options have been advanced lack consideration of the process
of embedding in society and appropriate institutional frameworks for this
process. The focus has mostly been on improving economic and
technological characteristics of technological options, and much less on the
way existing rules were hampering their advance, the way these options
represented certain values and also threatened existing ones, and the way
these options involved whole new sets of interactions between a variety of
actors, including users. The relative success cases of green electricity and
decentral cogeneration showed paths characterised by the formation of new
networks and linkages, the set-up of alternative institutional arrangements
shaped to the specifics of the innovative concept, and patterns of imitation,