Transforming Innovation for Sustainability

By M. Leach, J. Rockström, P. Raskin, I. Scoones, Andrew Stirling, Adrian Smith, John Thompson, E. Millstone, A. Ely, Elisa Arond and 2 more. 2012

538 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The urgency of charting pathways to sustainability that keep human societies within a "safe operating space" has now been clarified. Crises in climate, food, biodiversity, and energy are already playing out across local and global scales and are set to increase as we approach critical thresholds. Drawing together recent work from the Stockholm Resilience Centre, the Tellus Institute, and the STEPS Centre, this commentary article argues that ambitious Sustainable Development Goals are now required along with major transformation, not only in policies and technologies, but in modes of innovation themselves, to meet them. As examples of dryland agriculture in East Africa and rural energy in Latin America illustrate, such "transformative innovation" needs to give far greater recognition and power to grassroots innovation actors and processes, involving them within an inclusive, multi-scale innovation politics. The three dimensions of direction, diversity, and distribution along with new forms of "sustainability brokering" can help guide the kinds of analysis and decision making now needed to safeguard our planet for current and future generations.

Subfields: Global and Planetary Change, Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law, Management of Technology and Innovation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8175148906fb840b22eb4c51b3f55eca55f17c60

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In Global and Planetary Change

In Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law

In Management of Technology and Innovation

Citations in the corpus

Understanding barriers to decision making in the UK energy-food-water nexus: The added value of interdisciplinary approaches (2016, background): “The research identified key stakeholders’ concerns, opportunities and barriers to better inform decision making centred on four themes: communication and collaboration, decision making processes, social and cultural dimensions, and the nature of responses to nexus shocks.”
Social-ecological resilience and biosphere-based sustainability science (2016, background): “The widely discussed, biophysically based, safe operating space framework has been combined with dimensions of the social foundation (e.g., Leach et al. 2012, Raworth 2012) and more recently in a biosphere context in relation to the Sustainable Development Goals (Griggs et al. 2013; Fig.”
Policy for innovative entrepreneurship: Institutions, interventions, and societal challenges (2021, background): “During this Decade of Action, innovative entrepreneurship can certainly be one component solving these issues worldwide (Leach et al., 2012).”
Sustainability transformations: a resilience perspective (2014, background): “A key research focus is therefore inclusive innovation and the role of interactive innovation spaces and change labs within which farmers, researchers, businesses, policy makers, and others can coproduce solutions (Leach et al. 2012, Seyfang and Haxeltine 2012).”
Systemic perspectives on scaling agricultural innovations. A review (2016, background): “It also relates to debates regarding the role of diversity and how scaling initiatives may reduce this, thus allegedly leading to increased vulnerability (Leach et al. 2012).”
Crafting Sustainable Development Solutions: Frugal Innovations of Grassroots Entrepreneurs (2016, background): “From this perspective, the notion of sustainability-driven innovation and entrepreneurship appears complex, hybrid and often contested [107,108].”
Integration: the key to implementing the Sustainable Development Goals (2016, background): “The world needs, as the STEPS Centre puts it (Leach et al. 2012), a new generation and category of sustainability professionals who can broker between global, national, and local issues, between research and use, and between biophysical and social aspects of sustainability; notably, this need is as…”
Twenty challenges to innovation studies (2015, background): “Nevertheless, there is still much more to be done before we complete the transition to environmentally sustainable or 'green' innovation (Leach et al., 2012).”
Identifying determinants, pressures and trade-offs of crop residue use in mixed smallholder farms in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia (2015, background): “In that sense, there might be also room for some organisations to act as ‘‘sustainable brokers’’ linking top-down and bottom-up initiatives to improve rural livelihoods and develop more sustainable mixed farming systems (Leach et al., 2012).”