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

40 Chapter 2
traditional forms of direct regulation because it becomes evident that
conventional command-and-control models are not able to cope with
‘wicked’ environmental problems (Bressers, 1991; Bressers and Kuks, 2001,
2003). Governance points to the interdependence among actors, their
interactions, and the rules associated with them. It also points to the
importance of collaboration as “no single actor, public or private, has all
knowledge and information required to solve complex, dynamic and
diversified problems” (Kooiman, 1993:4). Governance theory recognises the
increasing importance of civil society, for example, in co-setting the agenda
in processes of local and global environmental change.
Governance thus diverges from paradigms where either hierarchy or the
market is the dominant organisational form, and emphasises the role of
networks in organising relations between actors. Dominant processes of
governing in networks concern negotiation, accommodation, concertation,
co-operation and alliance formation, rather than the traditional processes of
coercion and command and control. In environmental policy, the increasing
interest in the concept of governance has shaped the emergence of cooperative
environmental strategies between public and private actors.
Examples are voluntary agreements between industry and government
(Glasbergen, 1998) and the stimulation of environmental management in
firms through the use of policy networks based on consensual steering
models (De Bruijn and Lulofs, 2000). The involvement of partners such as
national governments, business, and consumers is also seen as crucial in
European environmental policy. The fifth Environmental Action Plan of the
European Union for instance stresses the importance of shared
responsibilities among governments, business and the general public out of
the understanding that the ultimate goal of sustainable development can only
be achieved by relevant actors working together in partnership (CEC, 1993:
113). Understanding the relation of the nature of governance to patterns of
system innovation has more recently emerged as a research topic (Rotmans
et al., 2000, 2001; Grin et al., 2003, 2004; Grin, 2004; Rotmans, 2005).
Rotmans et al. (2000) argue that transitions commonly take place in four
phases: predevelopment (with little visible change but ample experimentation),
take-off (the system begins to shift as change gets under way), acceleration
(structural change takes place through accumulation of socio-cultural,
institutional and economic changes reacting to each other), and stabilisation.
According to them the nature of government intervention should be tuned
according to the phase in which the transition is. Rotmans et al. (2000, 2001)
developed the notion of transition management which tries to orient existing
dynamics towards transition goals chosen by society. The underlying idea is
that through a focus on long term goals of sustainability and its attention to
dynamics the conflict between long-term ambition and short-term concerns can