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

Theoretical perspectives 39
sunk costs and the perceived impossibility and inefficiency of such a shift by
the dominant actors (2002: 20). Using water and energy is a daily routine,
which may be changed only through interruption of routines (power fall out
or removal or home reconstruction project) or when discursive awareness
awakens (aware of the skills necessary to uphold the system, linkages, power
relationships). This discursive awareness can also be directed to the
environmental impacts that characterise the present make-up of the system.
The success of green electricity in the Netherlands, for example, suggests
however that groups of consumers can change their routines to some extent
if the mode of provision enables this and they acquire sufficient motivation
and information. According to Van Vliet making visible both environmental
impacts and the structures that uphold them provides a mechanism to open
up the system for change. Van Vliet argues that “environmental monitoring
can increase the visibility of systems of provision to its users, and thereby
lower the threshold for environmental renewal” (2002: 131). Also important
here is the symbolic dimension of consumption as an expression of culture:
people use goods and services to relate to other people or groups. He further
concludes that “environmental differentiation is a second core issue because
it inherently marks a transition from uniform provision in network-bound
systems towards dispersed, pluralist modes of provision. Such a transition is
a prerequisite for the development of those environmental innovations that
do not fit in the technological trajectories that characterise the phase of
uniform provision” (2002: 131).
The approach used by these ecological modernisation scholars is useful as it
includes institutional contexts and processes into the explanation of
environment oriented innovation and develops a research approach where
the focus is on co-evolution between technical and institutional innovations
emerging and reproduced in the networks which are studied. This type of
network analysis is useful to understand patterns of change, although there is
no specific attention for type of reform that can facilitate more radical
changes. The approach is useful in analysing changes, but convinces less in
explaining why these changes come about and why in these specific
configurations. Moreover, there is some lack of specificity regarding the
mechanisms through which environmental pressures lead to changes at the
level of firms and their networks.
Governance theory
Governance theory has in the last decade analysed new forms of steering
alternatives to hierarchical control models, especially more on co-operation
focussed models in which governmental, non-governmental and private
actors participate in mixed public and private networks (Mayntz, 1998). For
example, environmental governance models emerge as alternatives to