Climate change, rapid urbanization and other grand challenges increasingly force cities to rethink their urban (water) infrastructure. In particular, decentralized urban water management solutions, which can recover valuable resources close to the source are increasingly applied to remediate water scarcity, sanitation or environmental pollution challenges. Yet, although interesting demonstration projects with decentralized solutions (from here on labeled ‘decentralized UWM solutions’) are underway in several world regions, actors developing and implementing this transformative innovation are not effectively coordinating their efforts and sharing the latest knowledge. While effective technologies, business models, or regulative frameworks increasingly exist that could inform, inspire and improve similar activities elsewhere, details of local successes and failures are still (too) rarely shared or transferred across space. Drawing from experience on the mainstreaming of other transformative infrastructure solutions (like renewable energies, electric mobility or circular waste management), we posit that the global diffusion of decentralized UWM solutions has been significantly slowed down by this lack of interaction among key stakeholders, and the resulting lack of an effective innovation ecosystem.

The development of new industries in peripheral regions has gained renewed attention recently. Yet, the processes through which peripheral regions can mobilize external resources and capabilities, and turn them into locally sticky resources for structural change and longer-term economic prosperity, have not been sufficiently conceptualized. This article proposes anchoring-based regional system building as a third route, which stands between conventional globalist and regionalist approaches. Based on a case study of the emergence of a globally leading electric vehicle battery industry in Ningde, China, the article explores in depth the system resource-mobilization processes and dynamic capabilities by anchor tenants and regional stakeholders that allow peripheral regions to make long jumps in the product space. We show that if the anchoring process is smartly managed, developing emerging industries in peripheral contexts is not necessarily a casino strategy but can be a strategic approach for quickly and deeply transforming the industrial fabric of regional economies.

Infrastructure investments, a core element of slum upgrading, play a role in improving the livelihoods of over 1 billion slum residents globally. Established planning practices often successfully deliver functional infrastructure but evidence shows that their contribution to improved livelihoods often either is absent or declines sharply after some time. To explain this limited effectiveness, this article identifies the missing link between infrastructure delivery and livelihood improvements as lying in the appropriation process, that is, the uptake and embedding of infrastructures into the daily practices of residents. Recent insights from sociotechnical transitions studies help to conceptualise appropriation. The authors use Munyaka informal settlement in Eldoret town, Kenya as a case to investigate the mechanisms of new infrastructure uptake. Findings indicate that appropriation is a social process that proceeds in three steps: reception, domestication and institutionalisation. This process is driven by the need to maintain or adjust residents' livelihood practices relative to prevailing socioeconomic and spatiotemporal conditions. The study concludes that appropriation is a significant process that planners should try to anticipate. Prevalent approaches to participation have to be modified accordingly. This is essential for planning to improve livelihoods in slums.

Unfettered growth of slums is a daunting transition challenge and many upgrading programs fail to sustainably improve the livelihoods of slum residents. This paper elaborates a transitions perspective on structural tensions that may lead to success or failure of slum upgrading programs. We conceptualize slums as urban subsystems, governed by sociotechnical (infrastructure) and socioeconomic livelihood regimes (related to production and social reproduction). The framework permits examination of the tensions due to mis/alignments of rules associated with newly introduced infrastructures, and those that regulate existing production and social reproduction practices of slum residents. This approach extends transition studies by accounting for the multi-system interactions between different infrastructure regimes (e.g., transportation, sanitation) and livelihoods within a local sociotechnical system. We apply this framework to an in-depth analysis of a slum upgrading project in Naivasha, Kenya, which was part of a national urban upgrading program covering a total of 80 slums.

Not all the challenges of informal settlement upgrading programmes can be anticipated from the start. It calls for cumulative learning within the programme's timeline. This paper investigates the role of organizational learning in influencing programme outcomes. The analysis of the Kenya Informal Settlement Improvement Programme (KISIP) shows that a lack of organizational learning routines can lead to reduced programme success, and that programme learning can improve programme outcomes. Well-conceptualized processes that include participation, coordination, communication and the synthesis of information are essential, though insufficient alone. Additional barriers, including a sudden increase in the number and diversity of actors and projects, their deteriorating commitment, inequitable incentives and inadequate tools to support programme learning, can further exacerbate the absence of established programme learning routines. There is a need for explicit and transparent programme learning procedures across organizational levels in order to improve overall programme success.

The global space sector has to increasingly consider sustainability concerns in the orbit, given the rising challenge of space debris. In which direction the management of space debris will develop in terms of technological solutions, policies, and actor strategies remains still unclear. This paper applies the concept of ‘global socio-technical regimes’ to better understand how actors in the global space sector frame, conceive, and legitimize the space debris problem. More specifically, we apply a discourse network analysis method – sociotechnical configuration analysis – to identify and map different value orientations by core actors over the last fifteen years. This analysis reveals three development stages in the discourse: a problem identification period (2007-2011), followed by the rise of national interests amidst increasing promises of space-based infrastructures (2012–2015), and finally, the emergence of a global socio-technical regime that increasingly connects space sustainability with Earth-bound sustainability (2016-2019). Based on our analysis, we expect that ensuring future earth-space sustainability will include a broader mix of challenges. Future approaches to space debris management will have to consider a broader and clearer problem framing to help inform effective policy making.

Classic accounts of transitions research have predominantly built on reconstructions of historical transition processes and in-depth case studies to identify and conceptualize socio-technical change. While such approaches have substantively improved our understanding of transitions, they often suffer from methodological nationalism and a lack of generalizability beyond spatial and sectoral boundaries. To address this gap, we propose a novel methodology – socio-technical configuration analysis (STCA) – to map and measure socio-technical alignment processes across time and space. STCA provides a configurational and dynamic perspective on how social and technical elements get aligned into "configurations that work", allowing for the identification of differentiated transition trajectories at and across spatial and sectoral contexts. The methodology's value is illustrated with the empirical case of an ongoing shift from centralized to more modular infrastructure configurations in the global water sector. Building on this illustration, we outline potential contributions of STCA to configurational theorizing in transition studies, sketching the contours of what we believe could become a generative epistemological approach for this field.

The technological innovation systems (TIS) framework is one of the dominant perspectives in transitions studies to analyze success conditions and system failures of newly emerging technologies and industries. So far, TIS studies mostly adopted a rather harmonious view on the values of actors and by this were unable to address competition, conflicts and, in particular, battles over diverging directionalities within the system. To empirically assess this potential “harmony fallacy”, we identify values as part of underlying institutional logics of major organizations in the field of modular water technologies in Switzerland by means of 26 expert interviews. We show how logics may condition collaboration patterns and technological preferences. This analysis inspires key conceptual tasks of innovation system analysis, like the identification of system failures, the setting of appropriate system boundaries and the formulation of better policy recommendations.

Innovation studies is increasingly acknowledging the multi-scalar nature of the systemic contexts, in which innovations are being developed and deployed. This paper builds on and further develops a recently proposed framework for studying global innovation systems (GIS). It aims at explaining the emergence of a GIS by outlining the specific local resource-related conditions that lead to the creation of structural couplings, i.e. actors, networks and institutions that allow for multi-scalar resource flows. Deploying a qualitative case study, the paper investigates the interrelated developments of eight demonstration sites of innovative wastewater treatment technology in North-Western Europe. It shows how resource-related deficits lead actors to draw on resources generated outside of their local context. The paper contributes to the literature on the Geography of Transitions by highlighting the importance of resource complementarities among different local contexts, as well as the crucial role of trans-local systemic intermediaries in shaping an emergent GIS.

This working paper is part of the Socio-Technical Configuration Analysis (STCA) guidebook for beginners (see stca.guide). It serves as Chapter 1 of the guidebook, and introduces the conceptual and methodological foundations for the different analytical steps that are explained in subsequent chapters. We elaborate on the theoretical contexts in which socio-technical configurations, their dynamics and geographical variation play a key role and how this epistemological approach relates to well-established conceptual frameworks from innovation and transition studies. In STCA, statements or actions of actors that are reported in document stocks are aggregated into different forms of network or proximity map graphs, which can be interpreted as coherent storylines or strategies reflecting institutionalized socio-technical configurations shared by various actors. Shifts over time of these networks can then be interpreted as depicting transition dynamics, and comparisons across space as local variations of regime or innovation system structures. The paper introduces a coherent terminology to help researchers navigate through the different steps and software programs. It furthermore elaborates on a typology of research problems that can be analyzed through STCA and an overview on the generic steps that a researcher has to conduct when applying the method.

Most experts agree that automated vehicles (AV) will be commercialized sooner or later and that this will lead to far-reaching changes in the mobility system. However, it is still open whether these developments will lead to more sustainable transport systems. AVs may render private car ownership more attractive and therefore intensify car-oriented mobility patterns, or may increase the attractiveness of public transport when mostly used as robo-taxis. Once development has started to move in a specific direction, self-reinforcing dynamics and path-dependencies may unfold. Therefore, it is important to analyze which factors may influence the direction of path-dependencies. We argue that understanding emerging path-dependencies requires an understanding of the interrelated technical, economic and societal dynamics. We draw on recent insights into societal dynamics in sociotechnical regimes, drawn from sustainability transition research, to identify potential development trajectories of automated driving due to changes in what is conceptualized as normative-cognitive institutions. We introduce an approach to map such institutional dynamics based on recent data from developments in the German mobility sector. Results demonstrate that the direction of future AV pathways may depend on such institutional developments. Both a reinforcing and a disruptive pathway are plausible. Governance strategies that aim to tap the potential of AVs in supporting sustainable urban mobility should consider institutional dynamics more explicitly.

The journal Environmental Innovation and Societal Transitions (EIST) recently celebrated its tenth anniversary. Its development represents a great success, contributing substantially to the consolidation and maturation of the research field of sustainability transitions. However, being content with past successes will not be sufficient for tackling emerging challenges. In this perspective paper, we take stock of recent dynamics in the field by analyzing the evolving knowledge structure of the papers published in the journal. Based on these insights, we share the editorial priorities of the new editorial team and elaborate how we want to position the journal in the rapidly changing landscape of academic publishing. This is in the hope to align expectations with future authors and readers and to serve our quickly growing research field even better as it increasingly gains academic recognition and policy relevance.

Modulare Systeme ermöglichen eine dezentralere und damit flexiblere Gestaltung der Siedlungswasserwirtschaft. Im Rahmen des Nationalen Forschungsprogramms 73 «Nachhaltige Wirtschaft» untersuchte das Forschungsteam des Projekts COMIX die zu erwartenden Chancen und Risiken, die sich aus diesen Entwicklungen für einen nachhaltigeren Umgang mit der Ressource Wasser in der Schweiz ergeben könnten.

The academic literature largely acknowledges participation as a key condition for the successful upgrading of informal settlements. However, how individual participative actions of different actor groups and reactions of dwellers combine to influence project outcomes of upgrading processes has not been studied. This article posits that different combinations of presence or absence of collaborative interactions between dwellers and other actors will decisively predict the success and failure of projects. Specifically, we argue that interactions between different groups of implementers and dwellers are conditioned by distinctive value systems - institutional logics - , which provide specific challenges to establishing collaborative interactions with dwellers as the actors conduct their roles. We identify sufficient combinations of participative actions that may lead to successful upgrading using qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) on 15 informal settlements in Kenya's secondary towns that were recently upgraded. Our findings indicate that participation has to consider a multiplicity of actors, who are guided by different logics; it has to span over the whole implementation cycle. It also has to deal reflexively with the issue of representation of the community. This extends the understanding of participation to a perspective that emphasizes the capabilities of implementers to enact collaborative relationships by bridging between their own and the community's institutional logic.

This paper investigates how actors across spatial levels shape the directions of transition. We examine two Chinese provinces, Inner Mongolia and Jiangsu, with contrasting directionalities of solar photovoltaic (PV) development. The former developed PV as part of the large-scale centralized power system, and the latter focused on PV development as a core element of an alternative distributed form of power generation. We argue that three aspects have been key for understanding the divergent patterns: the specific portfolio of enacted institutional work; the type of interactions between niche and regime actors; and the selective leveraging of national institutional conditions by provincial actors.

There have been increasing calls in transition research for a global view of sustainability challenges. We argue that this focus should be expanded from a concentration on the Earth's surface and stratosphere to include outer space. The substantial growth of the space sector over the past decade has seen huge increases in the number of rocket launches, the diversity of actors, and the availability of new essential services that depend on space-based infrastructure. In particular, the rise of satellite-based infrastructure could drive the need for inter-related multi-system transitions across a wide range of Earth-bound sectors. These developments, however, cause diverse new sustainability pressures, such as atmospheric pollution, increased energy consumption, and the accumulation of space debris. To address these challenges, this article proposes earth-space sustainability as a new frontier for sustainability transition research, requiring the expansion of conceptual and analytical tools at the interface of transition and global governance research.

Latecomer countries are increasingly confronted with the simultaneous challenge of achieving industry competitiveness and sustainability transitions. We revisit the long-standing debate on how latecomers may break free from the trajectories of the developed countries and leapfrog into more sustainable directions. Connecting insights from the fields of catching-up, socio-technical transitions, and economic geography, we propose a heuristic typology of four development pathways for latecomers. While the catching-up literature has focused on knowledge development as a main strategy, we posit that to address grand challenges, it is imperative for latecomers to implement valuation-focused strategies, which include shaping technology legitimacy, markets, and finance flows at the systemic level. We showcase the shifting trajectory of the Chinese solar photovoltaic industry from technology catching-up to forging ahead in pre-existing global value chains, and eventually towards transformative leapfrogging aimed at reconfiguring the entire socio-technical system of the electricity sector. We conclude with a research agenda for latecomer development.

Renewable energy sectors are becoming increasingly globalized with lead firms appropriating value on a global scale: This creates challenges for nations seeking to anchor some of the value locally through indigenous industrial development. Since lead firms select their suppliers for a given deployment project, national governments can set incentives for these firms to opt for local suppliers. We use the case of offshore wind in Europe to quantitatively measure the origin of suppliers across three global value chain governance modes: market, modular and relational. Suppliers can originate from the windfarm country, the lead firm's country or the global market. We test supplier selection across the modes of governance, domestic market size and local content push using a database of over 12,000 supplier contracts. The results indicate that lead firms mostly draw from the global market for market-coordinated segments, while favoring local suppliers under local content regulations. Local lead firms have a higher tendency to source locally for both market and relationally coordinated suppliers. However, local content push reduces the tendency of local lead firms to select local relational suppliers. Therefore, local content requirements seem to be broadly successful to stimulate locally sourced suppliers of the market-coordinated type; on the other hand, our results show that national governments should have local lead firms commission projects without imposing local content regulations to increase the odds that local relational suppliers are selected.

Community involvement is recognized as a core condition for success in informal settlements upgrading. However, the wider ramifications of this requirement are not well understood. Mostly, community involvement has been equated with a narrow interpretation of participation, largely focusing on the elicitation of dwellers’ preferences at the planning stages. We argue that this approach overlooks the actual needs for livelihoods reconstruction in the course of upgrading. To better conceptualize these requirements, we propose to analyse the time–space configuration of practices, which we frame as constituting Oscillating Domestic Spaces. The concept illustrates the contingent nature of daily activities to meet livelihoods needs and how people navigate these conditions. Challenges associated with reconstructing new domestic spaces are illustrated using the Kenyan Slum Upgrading (Kensup) initiative in Nairobi, Kenya. The findings suggest that an inadequate understanding and consideration of livelihoods reconstruction reduced legitimacy of the initiative, resulted in rapid deterioration of physical amenities and relegated most of the alleged ‘beneficiaries’ deeper into poverty. We suggest that, for successful settlements upgrading, livelihoods reconstruction should be a core process in the planning, implementation and post-implementation stages.

This editorial introduces a special issue with 27 short viewpoints about future research on transition studies, to commemorate the 10th anniversary of this journal.

This viewpoint takes stock with the 'geography of sustainability transitions' (GOST) as it is presented in the transitions research agenda. GOST has been a relatively recent addition to transition theorizing, addressing the need for greater sensitivity and attention to the scales, spatialities, and context-specific factors that shape transitions. In our view, the agenda represents a rather narrow perspective on GOST, which is geared to two empirical themes, namely urban transitions and transitions in developing countries. While these are relevant and topical issues, the section lacks sufficient acknowledgement of the increasing engagement of geographers with transitions studies and the theoretical approaches they have brought to bear on the field. This short commentary thus aims at complementing the agenda paper by outlining a theoretical research agenda that is emerging in this field, framed around the conceptualization of scales, places and spaces in which transitions unfold.

A persistent conundrum for practitioners and researchers in the development context is that, often, newly provided and improved basic services are not maintained by users despite seemingly superior functionality and user convenience. We argue that one major reason for this is an insufficient understanding of the context in which users have to manage their daily lives. We therefore propose an approach to analysing the embedding of basic services that focuses on the users' daily practices. We do so by borrowing insights from 'socio-technical transitions' and 'practice theory' in developing our concept of oscillating domestic spaces. The concept reflects the need for people to constantly respond to quickly changing and precarious circumstances by rearranging their daily practices in time and space and developing a multiplicity of alternative options and partial solutions. We illustrate the analytical approach in a case study of sanitation access in informal settlements of Nairobi, Kenya. The analysis shows how the introduction of a container-based toilet resulted in partial embedding. The innovation anchored to only a part of the oscillating domestic spaces and was in disarray with the needs of users most of the time. The conceptual approach contributes to the understanding about how users take part in sustainability transitions as well as the added value of the time-space dimension in analysing practices in highly complex contexts. We conclude by reflecting on the potential applicability of the analytical approach to transition cases in the Global North.

Research in economic geography has recently been challenged to adopt more institutional and multiscalar perspectives on industrial path development. This article contributes to this debate by integrating insights from (evolutionary) economic geography as well as transition and innovation studies into a conceptual framework of how path creation in emerging industries depends on the availability of both knowledge and legitimacy. Unlike the extant literature, we argue here that not only the former but also the latter may substantially depend on nonlocal sources. Conceptually, we distinguish between multiscalar export, attraction, and absorption of legitimacy. Coupled with conventional knowledge indicators, this approach enables us to reconstruct how not only external knowledge sourcing but also multiscalar institutional dynamics contribute to a region or country’s ability to leverage its potential for path creation in an emerging industry. Methodologically, we develop legitimation indicators from a global media database, which was built around the case of modular water technologies. Cross-comparing the evidence from six key countries (India, Israel, Singapore, South Africa, the UK, the US) with differing path creation constellations for this emerging industry, allows us to hypothesize how multiscalar legitimation influences a country’s prospects for creating a radically new industrial path.

Recent developments in high- and middle-income countries have exhibited a shift from conventional urban water systems to alternative solutions that are more diverse in source separation, decentralization, and modularization. These solutions include non-grid, small-grid, and hybrid systems to address such pressing global challenges as climate change, eutrophication, and rapid urbanization. They close loops, recover valuable resources, and adapt quickly to changing boundary conditions such as population size. Moving to such alternative solutions requires both technical and social innovations to co-evolve over time into integrated socio-technical urban water systems. Current implementations of alternative systems in high- and middle-income countries are promising, but they also underline the need for research questions to be addressed from technical, social, and transformative perspectives. Future research should apply a transdisciplinary research approach through socio-technical "lighthouse" projects that apply alternative urban water systems at scale. Such research should leverage experience from lighthouse projects in a range of socio-economic contexts, identify their potentials and limitations from an integrated perspective, and share their successes and failures across the urban water sector.

How does the spatial context shape early innovation trajectories and how will this influence the directionality of transitions? We elaborate these questions for the case of transitions in personal mobility, focusing on emerging trajectories of electric vehicles and autonomous driving. We analyze how the dynamics depend on whether innovation and transition strategies are primarily geared towards urban or rural contexts. In order to identify potentially diverging trajectories, we specify socio-technical regime structures at two levels: the level of service regimes (i.e. rules that relate to specific means of transport, like the car) and the level of the sectoral regime (i.e. rules that regulate the interplay between the different service regimes). We will show that depending on whether the early innovation strategies are oriented at rural or urban contexts, quite different directionalities can result both regarding the technological trajectory of the new service option, but also regarding the overall sector configuration.

The transformation of urban basic service sectors towards more sustainability is one of the 'grand challenges' for public policy, globally. A particular urgent problem is the provision of sanitation in cities in low-income countries. The globally dominant centralised sewerage approach has proven incapable to reach many of the urban poor. Recently, an increasing number of actors in international development cooperation has started to develop alternative safely managed non-grid approaches. We approach their efforts as an emerging 'global innovation system' and investigate how its development can be supported by systemic intermediaries. We analyse the activities of the 'Sustainable Sanitation Alliance', an international network that coordinates activities in the sanitation sector and thereby supports this innovation system. The findings show how demand ing it is to fulfil an intermediary role in a global innovation system, because of the need to consider system processes at different scales, in each phase of system building.

Users are increasingly acknowledged as important actors fostering those fundamental socio-technical innovations needed to achieve a sustainable society. In the literature, users have so far been portrayed mostly to play a role in early phases of technology formation. However, more recently users have become important players in the upscaling of various innovations. With the advent of new social media, users may interact effortlessly across large distances, exchange knowledge and so increase their contribution to upscaling. We investigate the new potential of virtual user communities. Conceptually, we build on recent insights from socio-technical transition studies to identify different upscaling dimensions. We conduct an internet ethnography of a large virtual community that formed around the Electric Vehicle (EV). Based on these data, we present virtual community characteristics and core mechanisms of participation in upscaling. We find that the community plays an important and distinctive role in fostering electric vehicle use.

In this chapter we advance the argument that regulatory policies can have a far-reaching impact on the organizational capabilities and, ultimately, on the performance of public utilities. Once capabilities are lost, it may be hard to regain them in the short term. Our insights are based on a qualitative-comparative analysis of capability-losing processes at Eskom, South Africa's national electric utility. South Africa experienced severe power outages between 2005 and 2008, which are commonly explained as having been caused by inadequate generation capacity, badly maintained power plants and insufficient coal supply. In this chapter, we go a step further and examine the underlying reasons at the organizational level. We show that a variety of new regulations led to a substantial loss of critical competences and skills at Eskom. This caused a deterioration of planning, operation and maintenance procedures, and made swift reactions to the crisis difficult. The 'capability perspective' presented in this chapter complements traditional theoretical explanations of utility and sector performance.

Transitioning economic sectors towards more sustainable futures is a major global challenge, in particular for non-OECD countries. Policymakers in these countries are confronted with a double challenge: how to implement cleaner technologies and infrastructures while at the same time promoting rapid industrial development. In catch-up studies, this trade-off has been increasingly interpreted as providing windows of opportunity for gaining strong leadership in new generations of cleantech industries. In this paper, we maintain that in order to specify how these windows of opportunity can be endogenized, a deeper understanding is needed about whether, how and by whom the directionality of innovation systems can be influenced. For this purpose, we propose an analytical approach that draws on the technological innovation system framework extending the current understanding of directionality in two ways: first, we complement the prevalent top-down perspective with a bottom-up view exemplified by the institutional entrepreneurship literature. Second, we posit that the focus has to be shifted from the manufacturing of single technologies to the transformation of entire socio-technical systems. The presented framework is validated by a case study on recent shifts in the dominant technology in China's urban water management sector. Major changes in the country's sectoral selection environment led membrane bioreactor technology to become the dominant design in urban water management - a development that is unmatched in any other country in the world. Owing to these transformations, China's technology firms outcompete multinational players and therefore they show strong potentials for industrial leapfrogging. However, although the promise to solve environmental problems played a decisive role in the shaping of the selection environment, it remains unclear whether the observed transformation leads the way to a more sustainable sector structure in the longer run. The case, however, still enables us to specify how windows of opportunity can be endogenized through the interplay of different actors trying to shape different layers of the selection environment in a specific sector.

The provision of basic services is falling short in informal settlements of cities in the Global South. In particular, public utilities have had difficulties expanding their services to the urban poor. Why is this the case despite utilities having improved their capabilities substantially over the last years? This paper investigates how innovation strategies of utilities are aligned or misaligned with the broader contexts in informal settlements, which are populated by different socio-technical regimes. We propose a framework to identify new capabilities needed by utilities to deal with these different regimes. The paper reconstructs pro-poor initiatives of a water and sewerage utility in a large East-African city and explains why they tended to fail in terms of livelihood improvement. We show how the alignment between capability portfolios and specific regime structures have set limits to the success of pro-poor innovation strategies in informal settlement contexts.

The provision of basic services suffers from a multitude of sustainability challenges in many cities of low-income countries. Sanitation provision faces particular challenges in the form of environmental contamination, high costs, and large inequalities among urban residents. In recent years an increasing number of innovations in on-site systems have been developed, which have not yet evolved into fully functional alternatives to the existing regimes. We study three prominent recent on-site sanitation initiatives in informal settlements in Nairobi, Kenya that aimed at developing entire "sanitation value chains", which we conceptualize as an emerging Technological Innovation System (TIS). The analysis leads us to propose alternative governance modes for the TIS to overcome system failures such as capability, coordination and institutional barriers. Conceptually, the paper extends conventional TIS analyses towards entire value chains, enabling a wide range of transition processes to be addressed beyond informal settlements and low-income countries.

Urban water management represents a core economic sector exposed to global water-related challenges. Recently, small modular system configurations have been identified to enable a potential sustainability transition in this lasting and rather conservative sector. The identification of current market potentials of decentralised wastewater treatment is a first step to assess whether decentralised treatment technologies could potentially be deployed on a larger scale in Europe, which would allow current decentralised wastewater treatment technologies to develop and mature. The paper elaborates a method to assess the market potential for decentralised wastewater treatment systems by starting from a raster-based geospatial modelling framework, to determine the optimal degrees of centralisation for the case of Switzerland. The resulting market potential is shown to be twenty times higher than the current market share of decentralised systems. In order to extrapolate these findings to other countries, the calculated optimal degrees of centralisation were correlated with different spatial density measures to determine a reliable and widely available proxy: population density. Based on this indicator, the European market potentials for decentralised treatment systems are estimated to be about 100,000 units per annum serving around 35 million population equivalents. The paper concludes by discussing implications for future sustainability transitions in urban water management by large-scale installation of small modular wastewater treatment systems.

Today's rapid global urbanization highlights the need for long-term transformations of basic service sectors in developing cities in order to improve the livelihoods of the urban poor. Sustainability transitions frameworks have proven fruitful for addressing these sort of challenges. However, they have been at pains so far in accounting for the heterogeneity and complexities that typically characterize informal settlements in the Global South. We therefore propose a conceptual framework that extends the conventional analysis of socio-technical regimes by distinguishing the two levels of sectoral regime and service regime. Challenges for sustainability transitions may then be identified by missing alignments within and among the two regime levels. The framework is applied to the sanitation sector of Nairobi, Kenya, a city experiencing rapid population growth and a highly uneven provision of basic services. Drawing on a set of 152 in-depth interviews, observations, and five focus group discussions, the paper reconstructs the prevailing service regimes and shows how they suffer from misalignments and dysfunctionalities creating all sorts of problems at a sectoral level. We conclude that Nairobi's sanitation sector can best be characterized as representing a splintered regime. The paper concludes with a discussion of how the new conceptualization of socio-technical regimes suggests some new sustainable transition pathways and how this framework might also be instructive for transition challenges in cities of the Global North.

This paper proposes a framework for the analysis of technological innovation processes in transnational contexts. By drawing on existing innovation system concepts and recent elaborations on the globalization of innovation, we develop a multi-scalar conceptualization of innovation systems. Two key mechanisms are introduced and elaborated: the generation of resources in multi-locational subsystems and the establishment of structural couplings among them in a global innovation system (GIS). Based on this conceptualization, we introduce a typology of four generic GIS configurations, building on the innovation mode and valuation system in different industry types. The analytical framework is illustrated with insights from four emerging clean-tech industries. We state that a comprehensive GIS perspective is instrumental for developing a more explanatory stance in the innovation system literature and developing policy interventions that reflect the increasing spatial complexity in the innovation process.

Towards a theory of regional diversification: combining insights from Evolutionary Economic Geography and Transition Studies. Regional Studies. This paper develops a theoretical framework of regional diversification by combining insights from Evolutionary Economic Geography and Transition Studies. It argues that a theory of regional diversification should not only build on the current understanding of related diversification but also account for processes of unrelated diversification by looking at the role of agency in processes of institutional entrepreneurship, and at enabling and constraining factors at various spatial scales. This paper proposes a typology of four regional diversification trajectories by cross-tabulating related versus unrelated diversification with niche creation versus regime adoption, and it develops a number of propositions.

ADDRESSING real-world problems is one of the purposes of integrative and collaborative research. Transdisciplinary research (TR) is a family of concepts and approaches that aims at better fitting academic knowledge production to societal needs for solving, mitigating, or preventing problems such as violence, disease, and environmental pollution. Transdisciplinary research strives to grasp the relevant complexity of a problem, taking into account the diversity of both everyday and academic perceptions of problems, linking abstract and case-specific knowledge, and developing descriptive, normative, and transformative knowledge for the common interest. Integration is a core feature and major challenge of TR. Practitioners of TR also call for a recursive approach to addressing problems, focusing on problem identification and structuring, investigation, and bringing results to fruition as the three phases of the TR process.
In this chapter we first describe the context in which TR and kindred approaches emerged in the second half of the twentieth century and the steps in developing TR as a form of research (Section 23,1). We then present a definition of TR that focuses on its role in addressing wicked real-world problems (Section 23.2). Next we explain challenges that come along with research on real-world problems (Section 23.3) and with providing knowledge for addressing such problems (Section 23.4). Tools for tackling challenges of the TR process appear after that (Section 23.5), illustrated by the example of the Sustainability Foresight project. The conclusion highlights open questions and ongoing debates requiring clarification for the next steps forward in TR (Section 23.6).

Sustainability transitions of sectors like energy, transport or water have become explicit goals of national policy programs in several parts of the world. The governance of associated innovation and transformation processes requires an integrated assessment on how new and seemingly superior technologies will interact with manifold societal, economic, industrial and political contexts. Failing to do so is likely to quickly undermine political support for these ambitious and long term projects. Part of the program of technology assessment is to anticipate the impacts of new technologies on society and the environment. However, in order to address the challenge of sustainability transitions, institutional dynamics have not been considered explicitly enough in existing approaches. We elaborate a methodological proposal on how to analyze the interaction between technological and institutional developments in specific technology fields. We identify potential future variations of core institutional structures of a socio-technical regime, construct matching regime constellations, and elaborate on interactions with technological design alternatives. The framework will be applied to recent developments in the field of electric mobility in the context of the German Energiewende. The results provide some fresh perspectives for academics and policy makers on how to better consider interactive dynamics in socio-technical systems.

The concept of innovation systems has been a guiding paradigm of innovation research and strongly influenced research and innovation policy since the early 1990s. In spite of this success, criticisms have been raised in recent years about whether it is still a suitable framework for addressing the innovation-related challenges of the future. In the present paper we claim that systemic explanations of innovation success have still a very important role to play. In order to address the rising criticism, however, we have to reconsider the conceptual core of the family of innovation systems (IS) approaches and sketch out a path for renewal. The paper retraces the conceptual roots of IS approaches, assesses their uptake in different policy circles around the world, discusses the conceptual core and explanatory ambition, and finally formulates a future-oriented research agenda for a more integrative innovation systems framework.

Where and how new industrial paths emerge are much debated questions in economic geography, especially in light of the recent evolutionary turn. This article contributes to the ongoing debate on path creation with a new analytical framework that specifies the formation of generic resources in embryonic industries. It suggests that path creation processes are not only conditioned by preexisting regional capabilities and technological relatedness but also by the way firm and nonfirm actors mobilize and anchor key resources for industry formation. Our framework elaborates on the early industry development phase, extending the focus on regional knowledge spillovers in evolutionary economic geography (EEG) literature with recent insights on industry formation dynamics from innovation studies. It understands early path creation as conditioned by four systemic resource formation processes—knowledge creation, investment mobilization, market formation, and technology legitimation—that can be mobilized both from inside or anchored from outside the region. The use and value of the analytical framework is illustrated by a case study on on-site water recycling technology (OST), based on interviews with 40 experts in three Chinese city regions. The findings suggest that, despite possessing the least favorable initial conditions, a sizable OST industry developed only in Beijing. This is explained based on the specific anchoring process of the four key resources in the early development stage of the industry. Our results imply that EEG would profit from incorporating a broader set of variables than knowledge-based relatedness in explanations of regional industrial path creation.

Technological innovation that is incongruous with established social rules and practices is often confronted with strong skepticism and a lack of societal legitimacy. Yet, how the early actors in a new technological field create legitimacy for new products is not well researched. This paper addresses this gap by proposing an analytical framework for the early technology legitimation phase that combines recent insights from innovation studies and institutional sociology. Both literatures agree that technology legitimation depends on a complex alignment process in which the technology and its institutional context mutually shape each other. Innovation system studies recently proposed to explore these processes in more detail. So far, this literature has mainly treated legitimacy as an outcome of overall system maturation and has not ventured into assessing legitimation as an active process. The framework we put forward in this paper conceptualizes technology legitimation as being enacted by different actors in a technological innovation system through specific forms of institutional work. This framework is illustrated with a case study on potable water reuse, in this case the injection of treated wastewater into drinking water reservoirs — a technology most consumers confront with revulsion. California is among very few regions worldwide where this technology is becoming common practice. Interviews with 20 key stakeholders and content analysis of 124 newspaper articles reveal how technology proponents worked on legitimizing this controversial technology by engaging in system building and institutional work at various levels. We outline how the legitimation process interrelates with other core development processes of a technological innovation system and discuss how our framework informs recent work in innovation and transition studies.

Decentralised wastewater treatment is increasingly gaining interest as a means of responding to sustainability challenges. Cost comparisons are a crucial element of any sustainability assessment. While the cost characteristics of centralised waste water management systems (WMS) have been studied extensively, the economics of decentralised WMS are less understood. A key motivation for studying the costs of decentralised WMS is to compare the cost of centralised and decentralised WMS in order to decide on cost-efficient sanitation solutions. This paper outlines a model designed to assess those costs which depend on the spatial density of decentralised wastewater treatment plants in a region. Density-related costs are mostly linked to operation and maintenance activities which depend on transportation, like sludge removal or the visits of professionals to the plants for control, servicing or repairs. We first specify a modelled cost-density relationship for a region in a geometric two-dimensional space by means of heuristic routing algorithms that consider time and load-capacity restrictions. The generic model is then applied to a Swiss case study for which we specify a broad range of modelling parameters. As a result, we identify a ‘hockey-stick’-shaped cost curve that is characterised by strong cost reductions at high density values which level out at around 1 to 1.5 plants per km². Variations in the cost curves are mostly due to differences in management approaches (scheduled or unscheduled emptying). In addition to the well-known diseconomies of scale in the case of centralised sanitation, we find a similar generic cost behaviour for decentralised sanitation due to economies of density. Low densities in sparsely populated regions thus result in higher costs for both centralised and decentralised system. Policy implications are that efforts to introduce decentralised options in a region should consider the low-density/high-cost problem when comparing centralised and decentralised options.

To determine the optimal connection rate (CR) for regional waste water treatment is a challenge that has recently gained the attention of academia and professional circles throughout the world. We contribute to this debate by proposing a framework for a total cost assessment of sanitation infrastructures in a given region for the whole range of possible CRs. The total costs comprise the treatment and transportation costs of centralised and on-site waste water management systems relative to specific CRs. We can then identify optimal CRs that either deliver waste water services at the lowest overall regional cost, or alternatively, CRs that result from households freely choosing whether they want to connect or not. We apply the framework to a Swiss region, derive a typology for regional cost curves and discuss whether and by how much the empirically observed CRs differ from the two optimal ones. Both optimal CRs may be reached by introducing specific regulatory incentive structures.

Efficient infrastructure planning is essential to achieve a more sustainable future. This includes aiming for optimal and economically more efficient infrastructures in the field of urban water management (UWM). Especially network-based infrastructures need special attention as they are generally very cost intensive and have distinctly demanding planning characteristics. Today’s historically evolved UWM practices tend to be network-based as in the last century enormous investments have been made to build-up vast sewer networks and large central wastewater treatment plants which centrally connect very high population percentages in many countries. The construction of large network infrastructures has resulted in a dominant centralised planning paradigm and heavily centralised wastewater management systems (WMS). However, this strong central planning paradigm is increasingly being questioned with respect to sustainability challenges and the call is becoming louder for innovative and radical approaches to address future challenges in the field of UWM. One such innovative approach is the decentralised treatment of wastewater by decentralised WMS, although in countries with high central connection rates this has so far been seen mainly as a stopgap solution. Today, connection rates differ significantly across countries: Great differences exist not only between high-income and low-income countries but also within OECD countries. It is unclear to what degree centralised or decentralised WMS should be installed in a region from the point of view of economic efficiency. Whereas the UWM literature presents specific cost assessments, there is a paucity of tools and methods to assess the costs of WMS consisting of centralised and decentralised systems (hybrid WMS). There are also few cost assessments of decentralised WMS with respect to their operation and maintenance costs. This dissertation uses an economic geospatial model-based approach to address the challenging research question of the optimal degree of centralisation. Conceptually, especially the spatially explicit full-cost modelling and the socio-technical conceptualisation of WMS are of special relevance. The basic trade-off between wastewater transportation and treatment is modelled in a geographically explicit way, economies of density for decentralised systems are assessed and a framework is presented to assess different optimal connection rates for hybrid systems. This framework is then used to assess economically sustainable connection rates in order to promote the economic argumentation for a possible sustainability transition in UWM. [...]

Literature on socio-technical transitions has primarily emphasized the co-determination of institutions and technologies. In this paper, we want to focus on how actors play a mediating role between these two pillars of a socio-technical system. By introducing the theoretical concept of institutional work, we contribute to the conceptualization and empirical assessment of agency processes in socio-technical systems. We illustrate this approach by analyzing recent developments in the Australian urban water sector, where seawater desalination technology has experienced an unexpected, but rapid diffusion to all major cities, often interpreted as a reaction to a major multi-year drought. However, the drought broke and left all but one plant unused. This has led many commentators wonder how such a massive investment – which is likely to limit alternative development trajectories in the sector for the coming decades – could have happened so quickly and why other, potentially more sustainable technologies, have not been able to use the momentum of the crisis to break through. A comparative analysis between seawater desalination and its main rival wastewater recycling in regard to processes of institutional work provides valuable insight into how technology, actors and institutions mutually shaped each other.

In many regions of the world, urban water systems will need to transition into fundamentally different forms to address current stressors and meet impending challenges—faster innovation will need to be part of these transitions. To assess the innovation deficit in urban water organizations and to identify means for supporting innovation, we surveyed wastewater utility managers in California. Our results reveal insights about the attitudes towards innovation among decision makers, and how perceptions at the level of individual managers might create disincentives for experimentation. Although managers reported feeling relatively unhindered organizationally, they also spend less time on innovation than they feel they should. The most frequently reported barriers to innovation included cost and financing; risk and risk aversion; and regulatory compliance. Considering these results in the context of prior research on innovation systems, we conclude that collective action may be required to address underinvestment in innovation.

The top priorities for urban water sustainability include the provision of safe drinking water, wastewater handling for public health, and protection against flooding. However, rapidly aging infrastructure, population growth, and increasing urbanization call into question current urban water management strategies, especially in the fast-growing urban areas in Asia and Africa. We review innovative approaches in urban water management with the potential to provide locally adapted, resource-efficient alternative solutions. Promising examples include new concepts for stormwater drainage, increased water productivity, distributed or on-site treatment of wastewater, source separation of human waste, and institutional and organizational reforms. We conclude that there is an urgent need for major transdisciplinary efforts in research, policy, and practice to develop alternatives with implications for cities and aquatic ecosystems alike.

Potable water and flushing toilets in households are taken for granted in today's Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries. Close to 100 percent of the population in most OECD countries has access to safe drinking water, and ca. 70 percent is connected to wastewater treatment plants (Aubin and Varone, 2007; OECD, 2011; OECD Environment Directorate, 2008). This taken-for-granted situation is largely possible due to extensive governmental planning, management, and investments in water and wastewater infrastructure (OECD, 2009). The expansion of domestic water service provision occurred via public subsidies, with service provision provided by primarily local and regional governments and, hence, predominantly public organizations (Citroni, 2010). Indeed, the water and wastewater sectors in OECD countries have been developed as centralized systems of treatment plants and waterworks with vast, integrated networks of water supply mains and wastewater pipes. Accordingly, these sectors can be considered 'typical' public network utility sectors (Luis-Manso, 2007: 2). [...]

Legitimacy is central for both novel and established technologies to mobilize the resources necessary forgrowth and survival. A loss of legitimacy, in turn, can have detrimental effects for an industry. In thispaper, we study the rise and fall of technology legitimacy of agricultural biogas in Germany over a periodof more than 20 years (1990–2012). The field witnessed impressive growth and professionalization formany years and has become one of the key technologies in Germany’s energy transition. In recent years,however, it has been confronted with major criticism, which finally resulted in a substantial cut-backof public and political support. The aim of our study is twofold. In empirical terms, we will explainthe technology’s loss of legitimacy despite its compliance with original policy objectives: growth andmaturation. In theoretical terms, we work toward a more general framework to understand technologylegitimacy and to explain the institutional dynamics of technological innovation systems.

The Network for Transdisciplinary Research (td-net) of the Swiss Academies of Arts and Sciences seeks to foster transdisciplinary research and showcase new approaches addressing topics of societal relevance and impact. The Jury honours the awardees and encourages them to go on contributing to the maturation of their fields.

This paper addresses interactions between technological innovation systems (TIS) and wider "context structures". While TIS studies have always considered various kinds of contextual influences, we suggest that the TIS framework can be further strengthened by a more elaborated conceptualization of TIS context structures and TIS–context interactions. For that purpose, we identify and discuss four especially important types of context structures: technological, sectorial, geographical and political. For each of these, we provide examples of different ways in which context structures can interact with a focal TIS and how our understanding of TIS dynamics is enhanced by considering them explicitly. Lessons for analysts are given and a research agenda is outlined.

The strong reliance of most utility services on centralised network infrastructures is becoming increasingly challenged by new technological advances in decentralised alternatives. However, not enough effort has been made to develop planning tools designed to address the implications of these new opportunities and to determine the optimal degree of centralisation of these infrastructures. We introduce a planning tool for sustainable network infrastructure planning (SNIP), a two-step techno-economic heuristic modelling approach based on shortest path-finding and hierarchical-agglomerative clustering algorithms to determine the optimal degree of centralisation in the field of wastewater management. This SNIP model optimises the distribution of wastewater treatment plants and the sewer network outlay relative to several cost and sewer-design parameters. Moreover, it allows us to construct alternative optimal wastewater system designs taking into account topography, economies of scale as well as the full size range of wastewater treatment plants. We quantify and confirm that the optimal degree of centralisation decreases with increasing terrain complexity and settlement dispersion while showing that the effect of the latter exceeds that of topography. Case study results for a Swiss community indicate that the calculated optimal degree of centralisation is substantially lower than the current level.

Water resource managers often tout the potential of potable water reuse to provide a reliable, local source of drinking water in water-scarce regions. Despite data documenting the ability of advanced treatment technologies to treat municipal wastewater effluent to meet existing drinking water quality standards, many utilities face skepticism from the public about potable water reuse. Prior research on this topic has mainly focused on marketing strategies for garnering public acceptance of the process. This study takes a broader perspective on the adoption of potable water reuse based on concepts of societal legitimacy, which is the generalized perception or assumption that a technology is desirable or appropriate within its social context. To assess why some potable reuse projects were successfully implemented while others faced fierce public opposition, we performed a series of 20 expert interviews and reviewed in-depth case studies from potable reuse projects in California. Results show that proponents of a legitimated potable water reuse project in Orange County, California engaged in a portfolio of strategies that addressed three main dimensions of legitimacy. In contrast, other proposed projects that faced extensive public opposition relied on a smaller set of legitimation strategies that focused near-exclusively on the development of robust water treatment technology. Widespread legitimation of potable water reuse projects, including direct potable water reuse, may require the establishment of a portfolio of standards, procedures, and possibly new institutions.

This paper analyzes the ability of water utilities to contribute to sustainability transition processes. More specifically, we compare the capacity of utilities, embedded in purely public, mixed and largely private governance modes, to innovate. We employ dynamic capabilities as core indicators for innovativeness and therefore as major enabling factors for sustainable sector transitions. We assess the relationship between governance modes and innovation by conducting an in-depth comparative analysis of three water utilities, each within a differing governance mode along the public-to-private continuum: Zurich, Berlin and Leeds. While we find that the private and mixed governance modes have an increased degree of innovativeness, they perform lower in terms of static sustainability criteria than the public mode. We therefore conclude that the impact of privatization on sustainability transitions in the water sector involves multi-dimensional trade-offs between static and dynamic sustainability criteria.

Transition research has recently been criticized to lack of geographically sensitive concepts to address sustainability transitions and environmental innovation processes. This has generated a number of suggestions how space, place and scale can be better incorporated into transitions studies. Moreover, it has led to a quickly growing number of empirical studies that explicitly deal with geographical aspects of transition processes. This special issue takes stock of these recent developments by assembling a set of eight exemplary papers that illustrate the added value of an explicitly geographical perspective on sustainability transitions. The contributions include a conceptual paper, a literature review and six empirical papers that offer representative examples of recent work. Taken together, these contributions testify to the vitality of the emerging research on the geography of sustainability transitions. This introduction to the special issue provides an overview of the special issue and offers suggestions for future research.

Almost 50 years ago, Wood (1964) argued that scientists could be part of an "apolitical elite" triumphing in the political arena, since "effective policy-making required fast and swiftly what scientists believed they had to offer: objective shifting of the facts, balanced visions, thoughtful reflection and the mobilization of the best wisdom and highest competence” (Wood 1964, 64). Since then, interest in the validity of scientific claims has expanded to wider audiences, and public trust in experts' problem-solving competence has eroded. Policy and society have increasingly confronted science with uncomfortable questions regarding the soundness of its methods and the validity of its knowledge products. [...]

Studies on technological innovation systems (TISs) often set spatial boundaries at the national level and treat supranational levels as a geographically undifferentiated and freely accessible global technological opportunity set. This article criticizes this conceptualization and proposes instead to analyze relevant actors, networks and processes in TIS from a relational perspective on space. It develops an analytical framework which allows investigating innovation processes (or 'functions') of a TIS at and across different spatial scales. Based on social network analysis of a co-publication dataset from membrane bioreactor technology, we illustrate how the spatial characteristics of collaborations in knowledge creation vary greatly over relatively short periods of time. This finding suggests that TIS studies should be more reflexive on system boundary setting both regarding the identification and analysis of core processes as well as in the formulation of policy advice.

In recent years, socio-technical transitions literature has gained importance in addressing long-term, transformative change in various industries. In order to account for the inertia and path-dependency experienced in these sectors, the concept of the socio-technical regime has been formulated. Socio-technical regimes denote the paradigmatic core of a sector, which results from the co-evolution of institutions and technologies over time. Despite its widespread acceptance, the regime concept has repeatedly been criticized for lacking a clear operationalization. As a consequence, empirical applications tend to depict regimes as too 'monolithic' and 'homogenous', not adequately considering persistent institutional tensions and contradictions. These are however crucial for assessing transition dynamics. In this paper, we revisit two concepts from institutional theory that enable an explicit identification of socio-technical regimes and more generally a specification of the 'semi-coherence' of socio-technical systems. First, we will show that 'levels of structuration' can be conceptualized as degrees of institutionalization, thereby treating institutionalization as a variable with different effects on actors, the stability of the system and thus the potential for change. Secondly, we draw on the institutional logics approach to characterize the content of various structural elements present in a system and to trace conflicts and contradictions between them. We illustrate this approach with an empirical in-depth analysis of the transformation of the Australian urban water sector since the 1970ies.

Electricity utilities have been recently confronted with numerous challenges including new regulations, the debate about smart electricity grids, and the increasing customer expectations for more energy efficiency and sustainability. With these challenges the utilities face a shift from a traditionally stable to a rapidly changing business environment (Massoud and Wollenberg 2005; Gellings 2009). Yet the turbulent environment offers new opportunities. For example, through the development of new photovoltaic technologies and tariff systems, customers change their role from simply consuming electricity to partly co-producing electricity. Furthermore, instead of paying for electricity, customers might pay in the future for reducing their consumptions, giving them the incentive to sustain this reduction in the long term. Electric cars might change the customers' ways to satisfy their mobility expectation and offer an interesting strategic opportunity for electricity providers (Friedman 2008). [...]

Transdisciplinary research plays an increasing role in topics of societal relevance and impact. The td-net of the Swiss Academies of Arts and Sciences awards innovative transdisciplinary research every other year. The last td-award was given in 2013. This special focus of GAIA features the six prize-winning projects, presenting short summaries of their work. Explaining its selection in the following introduction, the Jury of the td-net honours the awardees, and puts their work into a global perspective.

Interaction between institutional change and technological change poses important constraints on transitions of urban water systems to a state that can meet future needs. Research on urban water and other technology-dependent systems provides insights that are valuable to technology researchers interested in assuring that their efforts will have an impact. In the context of research on institutional change, innovation is the development, application, diffusion, and utilization of new knowledge and technology. This definition is intentionally inclusive: technological innovation will play a key role in reinvention of urban water systems, but is only part of what is necessary. Innovation usually depends on context, such that major changes to infrastructure include not only the technological inventions that drive greater efficiencies and physical transformations of water treatment and delivery systems, but also the political, cultural, social, and economic factors that hinder and enable such changes. On the basis of past and present changes in urban water systems, institutional innovation will be of similar importance to technological innovation in urban water reinvention. To solve current urban water infrastructure challenges, technology-focused researchers need to recognize the intertwined nature of technologies and institutions and the social systems that control change.

Urban water scarcity has been an issue for a long time in China while water pollution has attracted more and more attention over the last two decades. Recently, on-site wastewater treatment (OST) has been proposed as a meaningful alternative to deal with both water pollution and water scarcity in cities in a more sustainable way. However, the diffusion of such an OST system is still slow and often hindered by mismatched regulation, city planning and policy interventions. This paper is intended to explore potential solutions from institutional and governance perspectives. Based on expert interviews and in-depth analysis of an OST system in Kunming, an improved trajectory for diffusing OST in urban China is developed, which includes reformed decision-making and operational procedures, role transition of relevant stakeholders, and improved financing mechanisms. The results might give some suggestions for the transition of urban water management in other newly industrializing countries.

Literature on academic spin-offs gives evidence of different modes of interaction between spin-offs and their parent and their relative role in different modes of knowledge production. In this article, we examine the development of interactions between academic spin-offs and their parent organizations over a mid- to long-term period (4–15 years), drawing on a series of 25 case studies of spin-off/parent pairs from France and Switzerland. We show that the relational trajectories can be captured by four major dynamic patterns. These patterns range from an early cut-off of interactions in line with a linear model of innovation to sustained interactions supporting joint production of knowledge. Some patterns even include a change in the mode of knowledge production over time. In addition, we identify a number of determinants, internal or external to the pair, affecting the dynamic pattern. We conclude that management of spin-off processes and support policies for academic spin-offs should embrace this dynamic diversity.

On-site treatment could offer major advantages for future sustainable urban water-management systems (Larsen et al. 2013). Recent technological advances in fields such as membranes, chemical sensors and remote control open up a broad and promising range of new system configurations (Olsson 2013). So far however, the response to these opportunities has mostly been lukewarm among industry, water utilities and regulators (Nelson 2008). These technologies are obviously not yet considered to be a fully fledged alternative to centralized urban water management systems. This is because of the deficiencies of currently available configurations as well as great uncertainty about their functionality, reliability and cost-effectiveness in the near future. Besides technological uncertainties, on-site systems represent a major challenge to the current competencies of utilities for providing urban water management services and organizing their value chain. They therefore represent a potentially disruptive innovation for the established industry (Christensen 1997). Finally, on-site based urban water management structures are likely to show a mismatch with many institutional conditions (regulations, professional codes or user expectations) developed for supporting the established urban water management systems. Accordingly, on-site technologies also call for innovations in the societal context in which this new technology would have to operate. A future large-scale application of on-site systems to urban water management thus depends on the successful organization of innovation processes in three domains: (i) technological components and system integration, (ii) value chain formation and the development of new business models, and (iii) institutional innovations to create appropriate conditions under which these systems can reliably operate. So what is at stake is the management of a systemic innovation process (Markard and Truffer 2008). [...]

Die nachhaltige Transition soziotechnischer Systeme hat in den letzten zwanzig Jahren in der wissenschaftlichen Literatur zunehmend Aufmerksamkeit erhalten. Das analytische Kerninteresse bildet dabei die ko-evolutorische Entwicklung technologischer und institutioneller Strukturen sowie der Wandel hin zu neuen, potenziell nachhaltigeren soziotechnischen Systemen. Die Transitionsforschung bietet damit einen vielversprechenden Ansatz für die wissenschaftliche Untersuchung der Energiewende in Deutschland. Ein wichtiger Aspekt, der bislang eher vernachlässigt wurde, betrifft die räumliche Dimension von Transitionen. Der vorliegende Artikel referiert auf aktuelle wissenschaftliche Debatten zur „Transitionsgeographie“ und illustriert diese an empirischen Beispielen. Daraus leiten sich Forschungsfragen für die Energiewende ab.

Institutions play a crucial role for the development and diffusion of novel technologies. Many studies have analyzed the role of formal institutions such as support policies or specific R&D programs, while informal institutions have received less attention. With this paper, we contribute to the institutional analysis of emerging technological fields as we examine how the effects of formal institutions depend on informal institutional structures. We present findings from a comparative study of biogas technology in selected Austrian regions. Our findings suggest that the professional culture in which farmers are embedded modulates the effects of feed-in tariffs and investment subsidies to a considerable extent. This explains regional differences in the diffusion as well as variations in the design and operation of biogas plants. We argue that studies on emerging technologies benefit from a systematic analysis of the interplay of regulative, normative and cultural-cognitive institutions. We also argue that socichnical variation is an important indicator to look at in addition to diffusion rates.

This paper proposes a capability-based framework to explain performance deficiencies in utility firms as a result of policy and regulatory changes. The framework complements conventional explanations such as transaction cost and agency approaches, which suggest that appropriate incentives and regulations increase the performance of public utilities after relatively short adaptation processes. In contrast, we argue that capability gaps – understood as an inadequate availability of competences, skills and experiences – tend to have long-lasting effects on firm performance. A crucial implication of the capability perspective is that regulatory interventions that create capability gaps at the firm level may affect utility performance – and the ability of infrastructure sectors to provide adequate services – more severely than expected by traditional approaches.

A rapid implementation of potentially more sustainable sector structures in newly industrializing countries (NICs) is of key importance to reach global sustainability. The conceptual basis for assessing such "leapfrogging" potentials is however still rather weakly developed. The present paper elaborates an encompassing conceptual framework drawing on the technological innovation systems literature and adding an explicit geographical focus that embeds an NIC's innovation system in its international context. From this, we derive six ideal-type leapfrogging trajectories. The framework is applied to the case of a potential transition to onsite wastewater treatment in China. Empirical evidence is based on 30 expert interviews with representatives from companies, universities, authorities and associations in China and Europe. Our results suggest that leapfrogging in the Chinese wastewater sector might develop in either an integrated "international innovation system" trajectory, where Chinese and international actors closely interact, or in an "international competition" trajectory, where Chinese actors endogenously build up technological leadership in strong competition to international actors. We conclude by outlining policy implications and by discussing future research priorities for leapfrogging and transition studies.

In recent years, governments across the globe have developed plans for a Green New Deal to curb a combined economic and ecological crisis. Broad societal and industrial transformations should lead to more sustainable modes of production and consumption. These so-called sustainability transitions have become one of the grand challenges, and a major source of opportunity, for developed, emerging and developing economies in the twenty-first century. In academia, a corresponding literature dealing with conditions for sustainability transitions has attracted a lot of attention as a burgeoning field of research geared to analysing co-evolution of new technologies, changes in markets, user practices, policy and cultural discourses, and governing institutions in a systemic perspective.

In the past decade, the literature on transitions toward sustainable socio-technical systems has made a considerable contribution in understanding the complex and multi-dimensional shifts considered necessary to adapt societies and economies to sustainable modes of production and consumption. However, transition analyses have often neglected where transitions take place, and the spatial configurations and dynamics of the networks within which transitions evolve. A more explicit spatial perspective on sustainability transitions contributes to the extant transitions literature in three ways. Firstly it provides a contextualization on the limited territorial sensitivity of existing literature. Secondly, it explicitly acknowledges and investigates diversity in transition processes, which follows from a 'natural' variety in institutional conditions, networks, actor strategies and resources across space. Thirdly, it encompasses not only greater emphasis but also an opportunity to connect to a body of literature geared to understanding the international, trans-local nature of transition dynamics. Concerned with the prevalent lack of attention for the spatial dimensions of sustainability transitions in most studies, this paper seeks to unpick and make explicit sustainability transition geographies from the vantage point of economic geography. The paper argues that there are two interrelated problems requiring attention: the institutional embeddedness of socio-technical development processes within specific territorial spaces, and an explicit multi-scalar conception of socio-technical trajectories. Following these arguments, the paper concludes that transitions research would do well to take a closer look at the geographical unevenness of transition processes from the perspective of global networks and local nodes.

Sustainable transitions in the energy sector have gained only insufficient attention in economic geography so far. Conversely, transition scholars do not pay sufficient attention to the spatial dimension of these dynamics. This paper introduces a conceptual framework for analysing the spatial characteristics of market formation processes in emerging technological innovation systems, thus proposing a shared field of research for economic geographers and transition scholars. Drawing on a social constructivist analysis of market formation processes, we propose to differentiate "market formation" into three sub-processes for which we additionally specify spatial characteristics: (1) the formation of market segments, (2) market transactions and (3) end-user profiles. We apply this conceptual and explanatory framework to explain the uneven geography of photovoltaic market formation in Germany, the current world market leader in this field. By analysing the role of local solar initiatives in shaping and supporting local market formation processes, we are able to provide a more encompassing explanation of the German PV success story than alternative accounts that merely focus on strong incentive structures and favourable geophysical conditions.

The current paper focuses on absorptive capacity in the context of strategic innovation. Strategic innovation aims at a re-conceptualisation of business models, the creation of uncontested market spaces, and leaps in customer value. By using the learning-process perspective of absorptive capacity (exploratory, assimilative, transformative, and exploitative learning processes), we suggest that transformative learning processes in particular, play a key role in strategic innovation. In addition, a follower strategy and participative role in the knowledge network, instead of a first-mover strategy and a dominant role in the knowledge network, do indeed promote strategic innovation. Companies should not only manage the accumulation of external knowledge, but also adapt their combinative capabilities (systematisation, coordination, and socialisation of knowledge) in order to succeed with strategic innovation. The findings yield a set of research propositions for further academic and managerial consideration. Two longitudinal case studies of European electricity providers form the empirical background.

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to investigate the intentional formation of business networks in the wastewater industry. It enriches the theory-building of the formation of business networks by drawing on theoretical contributions to business networks and capabilities. The paper describes, assesses and predicts scenarios relevant to the formation of business networks in the wastewater industry.
Design/methodology/approach - The research methodology employed is based on multiple sources of data in a multi-method design, interpreting potential scenarios of business networks.
Findings - The findings reveal that water scarcity, population growth and economic constrains jeopardize existing business networks in the wastewater industry. Two potential scenarios: re-inventing the centralized system through on-site systems for mass-markets; and expanding on-site systems into mass-markets seem realizable. A comparison of the two scenarios suggests that the first scenario is in a superior position to utilize the business opportunities offered.
Research limitations/implications - Research limitations arise from the qualitative nature of the research undertaken.
Practical implications - Capability alignments and barriers suggest that the re-inventing the centralized system through on-site systems for mass-markets scenario, is the most suitable for implementation. The knowledge gained allows managers to outline a specific approach for developing the capabilities required, in order to take advantage of the alignments and overcome the barriers that may exist.
Originality/value - The paper highlights that building theories of business networks may benefit from combining the formation of business networks with dynamic and operational capabilities.

This article investigates the interplay of expectation dynamics and innovation processes at the level of organizations and at the innovation system level. We examine how different kinds of organizations contributed and responded to a recent hype and disappointment cycle in the field of stationary fuel cells. Among others, we trace how innovation and discourse activities changed and we explain the observed differences in strategic responses. We show that the sensitivity of organizations to expectation dynamics depends on at least three factors: the strategic embedding of the new technology, the organization's dependence on external legitimacy and its role in the innovation system. Moreover, we show that – in their aggregation – strategic responses affected the level of the technological innovation system as well. Not only did the pace and direction of innovation activities change, but structures such as actor constellations and institutions were also modified. Our study thus provides insights into the interplay of expectation and innovation dynamics, which is important for our understanding of larger transformation processes, e.g. toward more sustainable modes of energy supply.

Sustainability oriented innovation and technology studies have received increasing attention over the past 10–15 years. In particular, a new field dealing with "sustainability transitions" has gained ground and reached an output of 60–100 academic papers per year. In this article, we aim to identify the intellectual contours of this emerging field by conducting a review of basic conceptual frameworks, together with bibliographical analysis of 540 journal articles in the field. It is against this background that we position the six papers assembled in a special section in Research Policy. These papers pave the way for new conceptual developments and serve as stepping-stones in the maturation of sustainability transition studies, by linking with the scholarly literatures of management studies, sociology, policy studies, economic geography, and modeling.

Regarding multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA), the problem of generating alternatives has not received the attention it deserves. Most research is currently devoted to the problem of alternative selection, where it is assumed that a set of appropriate alternatives is already given. This paper addresses the generation of potential alternatives in the domain of sanitation systems planning and decision-making. A compatibility assessment procedure is proposed to determine the set of technically feasible or potential sanitation system alternatives. This is based on a clear definition of such an alternative containing sub-processes that include a user interface, storage, conveyance treatment and reuse/disposal. A newly developed compatibility matrix is applied to identify incompatibilities between the options of the sub-processes.
A potential sanitation system alternative is therefore defined by the absence of two-by-two incompatibility between all its options.
The compatibility assessment acts as a first filter on the set of sanitation system alternatives to eliminate those that are inoperable before the feasibility assessment. The objective of both steps is to obtain a set of alternatives that are of reasonable and manageable size from which the final solution may be selected.

Renewable energy can provide a host of benefits to society. In addition to the reduction of carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions, governments have enacted renewable energy (RE) policies to meet a number of objectives including the creation of local environmental and health benefits; facilitation of energy access, particularly for rural areas; advancement of energy security goals by diversifying the portfolio of energy technologies and resources; and improving social and economic development through potential employment opportunities. Energy access and social and economic development have been the primary drivers in developing countries whereas ensuring a secure energy supply and environmental concerns have been most important in developed countries. [...]

Environmental innovation and sustainability transitions in regional studies, Regional Studies. Sustainable development and environmental innovations have received increasing attention in regional studies and the related literature. In how far sustainability concerns might also lead to fundamental transformations in technologies, industries and lifestyles (so-called sustainability transitions) has, however, found much less resonance. Sustainability transitions have been in the focus of scholars from the field of innovation studies. However, until recently, these approaches mostly disregarded spatial aspects. This paper therefore maps out a field of future research – the geography of sustainability transitions – that might be beneficially laboured by both traditions. The paper introduces the core concepts, but also the limitations of the transitions literature. After reviewing salient lines of sustainability-related research in regional studies, the paper specifies promising research areas at the interface between both fields. Empirical illustrations will be provided from recent work in sustainability transitions research venturing into this interface.

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to analyze how strategic renewal affects the reconfiguration of capabilities. In the context of organizational change in a large utility firm, we examine the evolution of the capability structure, and explain the emergence and persistence of capability gaps.
Design/methodology/approach – The paper uses an inductive multiple case study methodology to compare four processes of capability reconfiguration at Eskom, South Africa’s electricity supplier.
Findings – The results show that strategic renewal unfolds through different processes, which vary in their impact. Some processes have an immediate effect in closing capability gaps. The impact of others is with a significant time lag. Most critical, however, are processes that widen capability gaps. As a result, firms may face severe and persistent performance deficiencies.
Research limitations/implications – Prior research has only marginally addressed the relationship between strategic renewal and capability reconfiguration, and has largely neglected emerging capability gaps.
Practical implications – Strategic renewal may cause unintended crowding out effects of specific capabilities. Managers need to consider these potential implications of strategic renewal.
Social implications – Understanding the challenges of how to improve the performance of utility services is crucial for economic development, welfare and social inclusion.
Originality/value – This study importantly highlights that the emergence of capability gaps is a common phenomenon rather than an exception in strategic renewal processes. The findings contribute to the strategic renewal literature and to management research in infrastructure sectors.

Infrastructure services such as electricity, water supply, sanitation and transportation are crucially important in our economies. Despite this importance, utility firms have found little attention in management research. This is surprising because the lack of adequate organizational structures, skills and specialized managerial know-how is an emergent issue and main challenge for many utilities worldwide. We propose a capability-based framework to explain performance deficiencies in utilities. The framework elaborates why capability gaps emerge and persist, and how this, in turn, affects performance. The insights from this framework go beyond the conventional explanations of the transaction cost and agency approaches, which suggest that appropriate incentives and regulatory structures increase the performance of public utilities immediately or after a short adaptation process. In contrast, capability gaps – understood as an inadequate availability of competences, expertise and experience – tend to have long-lasting effects because capabilities take time to develop. Especially if capabilities are highly tacit, correcting for a gap and rebuilding capabilities take time due to the involved learning processes. Consequently, performance deficiencies affect utility firms more severely than expected by traditional approaches. Deriving from the proposed framework, we discuss possible strategies that utility firms can implement to respond to capability gaps.

The technological innovation system (TIS) concept has established a strong tradition in analyzing emerging environmental industries. Despite the growing evidence of globalization of innovation activities, TIS literature has so far mostly focused on nationally bound systems. The present paper proposes an analytical framework for assessing the international dimension of TISs by adopting a relational view on actors and networks. Social network analysis provides indicators for specifying the errors which spatially "containerized" TIS studies are likely to commit. The framework is applied to a co-publication dataset on membrane bioreactor (MBR) technology, which reveals a strongly international and multi-scalar TIS structure. The findings suggest that the definition of spatial boundaries deserves much more attention in innovation studies. Economic geographers could play an important role in developing the concepts needed.

The technological innovation systems (TIS) literature has focused strongly on actors, networks and institutions in early development phases of specific technologies. Structures and processes concerned with setting up and developing end-user markets have gained much less attention. Especially in maturing innovation systems, such market-related structures play a decisive role for the long-term success of innovations. The present paper proposes a conceptual framework for analyzing TIS substructures oriented at specific end-user markets. We apply this framework to the creation and maturation of different market segments for photovoltaic applications in Germany. The paper concludes by outlining implications of a more differentiated conceptualization of market processes for TIS research.

Several strategic planning approaches have been proposed for dealing with future uncertainties in the urban water infrastructure sector. We identify three well established perspectives that address uncertainties in strategic decisions: an adaptive perspective, focusing on an incremental adaptation of existing structures as a reaction to unforeseen developments, a modeling perspective, focusing on an improved characterization of future context conditions and a managerial perspective, focusing on increasing the flexibility of the infrastructure organization. Despite their virtues, these approaches have definite weaknesses in their approach to uncertainty: they often consider a restricted scope of alternatives, they face substantial difficulties in predicting context conditions over time periods of decades and often consider objectives and tradeoffs only implicitly. We elaborate and illustrate with a case study a fourth perspective that may compensate for these specific weaknesses and complement the established strategic planning approaches. This perspective is based on a discursive, qualitative assessment of key elements in the strategic planning process among a selected set of local stakeholders and decision makers. We maintain that this approach leads to a more explicit and reflexive treatment of future uncertainty, conflicting objectives and a broadening of the considered alternatives and therefore to a more robust decision-making process.

This article introduces the new journal Environmental Innovation and Societal Transitions (EIST). We consider its key terms and offer a survey of relevant theoretical and empirical insights, policy issues and research challenges. Four theoretical approaches to studying sustainability transitions are identified. The treatise ends with a synopsis of the 19 articles in this inaugural issue and a list of suggested research themes.

Dezentrale Technologien in der Siedlungswasserwirtschaft sind vielversprechende Lösungsansätze, wenn Wasserinfrastruktursysteme neu errichtet werden müssen. Heute sind dezentrale Kleinkläranlagen etablierte Lösungen in Nischenanwendungen im ländlichen Raum von Industrieländern; Grauwasseraufbereitungsanlagen stellen ein relativ neues Produkt dar, das in wasserverbrauchsintensiven Gebäuden zunehmend eingesetzt wird. Hauptsächlich in Deutschland hat sich ein führendes Herstellerfeld entwickelt. In diesem Beitrag wird der Möglichkeit nachgegangen, dass in Zukunft weiterentwickelte dezentrale Wassertechnologien im Weltmarkt zu einer dominanten Standardlösung werden könnten. In diesem Feld könnte sich ein neuer starker Umwelttechnologie-Sektor entwickeln, der von der Kleinserienfertigung zur Massenproduktion wechselt. Andere Sektoren, wie die Hersteller von Windkraft, haben diese Entwicklung bereits vorgemacht. Basierend auf einer prospektiven Innovationssystemanalyse und einem Technology-Roadmapping- Workshop zeigt dieser Beitrag, in welchen Märkten und mit welchen Produkten eine derartige Sektorentwicklung mittel- bis langfristig vorstellbar ist.

Electricity generation from hydropower is responsible for a large part of the human impacts on water resources in the Alps. Attempts at finding an encompassing mitigation approach to these impacts are often confronted with high levels of societal conflict. Therefore, an integrative approach has to consider both ecological and political/social aspects of this economic activity. In the following, we will present an integrative mitigation approach that was developed as an eco-label for electricity in Switzerland. This label was developed and implemented in the early 2000s and has meanwhile been accepted as an environmental standard for hydropower operation in many other countries. The chapter emphasizes the interdisciplinary competencies needed as well as the potential benefits of an integrative approach to the problem.

Sustainability transitions have repeatedly been demanded in various economic sectors to confront global environmental problems. The present paper analyses the role of strategic planning processes for improving the prospects of achieving sustainable transitions in infrastructure sectors. Current planning approaches in these sectors tend to perpetuate the established socio-technical configurations by neglecting context uncertainties, by ignoring radical system alternatives and by focusing on narrow value considerations. In order to improve the prospects for sustainable transitions, more reflexive and discursive strategic planning methods are needed. We present the Regional Infrastructure Foresight methodology as a specific procedural proposal and analyse results from its application to a case study in the Swiss sanitation sector.

The requirements for urban wastewater management organisations in the field of strategic planning have risen significantly during recent years. Increasing uncertainties regarding requirements to be fulfilled in future, options for action and objectives require new methods and approaches. This article shows how strategic planning methods can be implemented in public wastewater organisations. This is illustrated by experiences from three Swiss wastewater management associations.

In this article, we put forward a concept for the identification and analysis of future development options of technological innovation systems. The key element of our approach, the so-called variation analysis, is a methodology to identify coherent socio-technical and organizational variants within a specific innovation field. Consistent combinations of these two dimensions may be interpreted as nuclei for alternative future developments of innovation systems. The method may be used in discursive foresight processes to inform strategy formulation of firms or policy makers who see a utility in furthering the innovation field. The paper has a focus on developing the theoretical background and the analytical structure of the methodology. Empirically, we illustrate the method for the innovation system of biomass digestion in Switzerland.

Infrastructure sectors in general, and urban water management in particular, have developed over the past couple of decades within the confines of a rather narrow and stable socio-technical regime. Nowadays, these infrastructures are increasingly confronted with uncertain context conditions, a broadened spectrum of technological alternatives and an increasing heterogeneity of value positions. As a consequence, the longterm sustainability of these sectors has been questioned by many commentators. Of particular importance is the way strategic decisions are made. Current approaches tend to block important opportunities for sustainable transformation. It is argued here that a more reflexive, discursive and participative approach to strategic planning is needed. The paper introduces «Regional Infrastructure Foresight» (RIF) as a method which combines foresight on regional framework conditions with a stakeholder assessment of a broad range of system options. The paper presents the methodology in some detail and discusses the main lessons learned through three empirical applications in the Swiss sanitation sector. Based on these experiences, it is argued that strategic decision making in infrastructures is of high relevance for regional policy and therefore warrants more attention in future research in economic and political geography.

The sustainable transformation of infrastructure sectors represents a challenge of prime importance worldwide. Due to long life times of infrastructures, strategic decision making has to explicitly consider uncertainties in context conditions, value considerations and available technological alternatives. However currently, strategic infrastructure planning is often carried out in a very narrow perspective. The present paper argues that foresight informed strategic planning, allows addressing trade-offs related to context uncertainties, value conflicts and sustainability deficits in a structured way. The paper introduces a specific procedural proposal, the Regional Infrastructure Foresight method (RIF) and illustrates its potential virtues through an application to urban water management planning in a Swiss region (Kiesental).

This Eawag project addresses the various decision-making aspects in sanitation system and technology selection as a support tool for choosing the best available options to secure sustainable sanitation systems.

The technical components of infrastructure systems are planned and designed to operate over time periods of 25 to 40 years. However, the context conditions under which an infrastructure organization operates can change drastically and unpredictably over this extended time frame, due, for example, to population developments, new regulations or emerging technologies. Several studies on the future of infrastructure sectors have recently raised doubts regarding the capacity of the public sector to adequately address this future uncertainty and secure the delivery of infrastructure services. Prominently, private sector participation has been proposed as an option to address this capability gap.
This thesis argues that public utility organizations can identify suitable alternatives to close this capability gap and thus improve their handling of future uncertainty by applying adequate management principles, such as formal strategic planning. Privatization is therefore not a necessary precondition for ensuring the long term delivery of utility services. This however requires an adaptation of existing strategic planning approaches to the particularities of the infrastructure sector, primarily 1) the high degree of path dependencies constraining the set of viable alternatives 2) the long planning horizons (and the related future uncertainty) and 3) the variety of environmental, social, economic and governance objectives imposed on the sector. [...]

Infrastrukturanlagen werden heutzutage für eine Lebensdauer von 25 bis 40 Jahren geplant und dimensioniert. Während dieser langen Zeitspanne sind Infrastrukturen starken Dynamiken ausgesetzt, die einen massgeblichen Einfluss auf deren Betrieb haben. So ändern sich etwa die Bevölkerung im Einzugsgebiet, die gesetzlichen Vorgaben und die technologischen Möglichkeiten. In verschiedenen Studien zur Zukunft von Infrastrukturen wird jedoch an der Fähigkeit der öffentlichen Hand gezweifelt, diese Dynamiken adäquat zu berücksichtigen und eine langfristige Gewährleistung von Infrastrukturdienstleistungen zu garantieren. Ein oft diskutierter Vorschlag zur Begegnung dieser Grundproblematik ist eine stärkere Beteiligung von privaten Unternehmen in Infrastruktursektoren.
In dieser Dissertation wird ein Alternativweg vorgeschlagen. Es wird argumentiert, dass öffentliche Infrastrukturunternehmen durch die Anwendung von Managementansätzen wie Strategische Planung durchaus in der Lage sind, geeignete Strategien zu entwerfen, um mit Zukunftsunsicherheit umzugehen. Hinsichtlich der Besonderheiten in Infrastruktursektoren bedarf es jedoch einer Anpassung der vorhandenen Ansätze zur strategischen Planung. Besonders zu berücksichtigen wären 1) der Grad an Pfadabhängigkeiten im Hinblick auf die Bewertung von Alternativen, 2) die langen Zeithorizonte und die damit verbundene Zukunftsunsicherheit und 3) die Bandbreite an Zielen (Umwelt-, Sozial-, Wirtschafts- und Steuerungsziele), der ein Infrastrukturunternehmen Rechnung zu tragen hat. [...]

This case study seeks to show, from an engineering perspective, the importance of historical insights. Urban water infrastructures and particularly the case of rainwater will be used as an example, since this is an issue which became increasingly controversial in Germany in the 1970s. It is remarkable that this happened, since this issue had apparently been settled during the development period of the conventional approach (closure). As the controversy emerged again, not only did it return to the engineering agenda, but by then engineering itself had specialized into separate sub-disciplinary fields. The analysis focuses on why and how the infiltration of rainwater succeeded in becoming established as an innovation in the field of sewage disposal rather than in that of water supply. Conclusions point to the context in which debates take place and decisions are made. Special consideration is given to the boundaries between these two most important sub-disciplinary fields of engineering, as well as to those between experts and laypeople. Apart from knowledge of certain techniques, history provides insights into the construction of the context and the interrelatedness of technology and society – into the co-construction of socio-technical solutions by society.

Network-bound infrastructure systems as electricity, gas, water and telecommunications are currently undergoing transformations on various levels and dimensions. Liberalization, technological innovations and socio-cultural dynamics are part of this. For analyzing these ongoing transformation dynamics as well as exploring future developments of utility systems, a theoretical concept is necessary which spans production, consumption and governance, different levels, and also different sectors. This paper argues that the multi-level perspective is a fruitful starting point allowing the identification of interrelated transformation dynamics in production, consumption and governance, but that multi-regime dynamics need more emphasis, particularly in a future oriented analysis.

This project was established to explore the consequences of structural change in German utility sectors and to raise awareness of the need for coordinated action by stakeholders as well as for the development of strategies for sustainable development. A three step procedure was applied comprising socio-technical scenarios, sustainability assessment and strategies for critical innovation processes. Interactions between four utility sectors - electricity, natural gas, water and sanitation, telecommunications - were considered. Stakeholders involved in production, consumption and governance have been involved at all stages. A multi-level approach was applied to link developments at the sector level with general societal developments and the dynamics of specific fields of innovation. The project also aimed at developing a general methodology for 'sustainability foresight'.

The innovation systems approach has been successfully established as a conceptual basis for an encompassing analysis of actors, networks and institutions that influence innovation processes. Here we present an approach that concentrates on the actors in a selected technological innovation system. The intention is to specify current or potential contributions of actors, or actor groups, to innovation system performance and dynamics. This will be achieved by explicitly relating actor level characteristics such as innovation strategies and resource endowments to system level characteristics like actor configurations, system functions and performance. We illustrate the approach with a case study on stationary fuel cells in Germany.

Technological innovation systems and the multi-level framework are closely related concepts for the study of far-reaching technological change. They draw on common theoretical roots and analyze similar empirical phenomena. However, they have developed rather independent research strands over the past few years. The paper reviews the state of the art of both concepts and explores commonalities as well as differences. Against this background, we outline first elements of a path towards an integrated framework that combines the strengths of the two approaches and allows providing a better understanding of radical innovation processes and socio-technical transformations.

The Swiss sanitation sector has to face high reinvestment needs after over thirty years of operation time. Solutions have to be detected which work properly under changing framework conditions during the entire constructions' Iifetime of at least 25 years. Solutions have to be integrated in an efficient and effective sanitation system from the source of the waste water producer to the receiving water. The regional urban water management system needs an integrative strategy to tackle this requirements. The strategy frames the design of the whole system and its elements. Strategy development has to handle complexities and uncertainties of long living infrastructures. This paper presents the participative planning approach «Regional Infrastructure Foresight - RIF›› with the help of one case study.

"Regional Infrastructure Foresight" enables municipalities, engineers and decision makers in regional sanitation systems to develop a mid- to long-term strategy for a sustainable sanitation infrastructure. Identification of uncertainties and future challenges of the regional infrastructure's context is carried out in a participatory scenario process. A broad range of possible integrated solutions for the sanitation system is evaluated from different stakeholders' views. This approach allows handling of uncertainties of frameworks, and of complexity of the system to find more adaptive system configurations for a sustainable sanitation system.

Expectations held by different actor groups are of key importance for the shaping of socio-technical transformation processes. Foresight activities may be interpreted as a means to elicit, aggregate, modulate and contextualize expectations held by different actors. The paper proposes a conceptual framework that allows assessing and reflecting expectations in foresight initiatives that focus on sustainable sector transformations. For this purpose it draws on the recent literature on socio-technical system transformations and social expectation dynamics. The application of the framework is illustrated by experiences gained with the Sustainability Foresight method developed for the case of sustainable utility sector futures in Germany. The process was conceived as a series of participative scenario and strategy workshops involving about 120 stakeholders from the provision, use and governance of utility services.

Recent debates in economic geography have emphasized the need for a more explicit analysis of innovation processes at a sectoral or technological level. A great deal of attention has furthermore been devoted to connect the internal disciplinary debate with the wider discourse of the social sciences that deal with economic development in general and with the role of innovation in particular. In the present paper I argue that the field of the social study of technology (SST) can inspire research in economic geography in important respects: SST research has an explicit focus on the genesis of sociotechnical configurations; it has developed sector-related and technology-related multilevel theories of sociotechnical change; it has a strong emphasis on innovation dynamics and sector transformations; and finally, it has a focus on strategic planning in multiactor settings and thus favors foresight and participatory planning approaches in science, technology, and innovation policy. SST-inspired research could thus be an interesting partner for those approaches within economic geography that share some ontological starting positions with regard to actors, the role of institutions, and a coevolutionary and multilevel analysis of sociotechnical transformation processes.

Rund 55 Prozent des Stromverbrauchs werden in der Schweiz mit einheimischer Wasserkraft gedeckt (Bundesamt für Energie [BFE] 2008). Praktisch alle grossen Schweizer Fliessgewässer sind daher hydroelektrisch beeinflusst (TRUFFER ET AL. 1998). Die betroffenen Gewässerökosysteme werden aufgrund der intensiven Nutzung auf unterschiedliche Weise beeinträchtigt: Durch vollständige Wasserentnahmen werden ganze Gewässerabschnitte trocken gelegt, ungenügende Restwasserdotierungen schränken Lebensräume ein, monotones Abflussregime und Geschiebemangel verhindern vielerorts die Erneuerung der Strukturvielfalt der Gewässersohle, und in den Rückgabestrecken unterhalb von Kraftwerken gefährdet das Schwall-Sunk-Regime die Wasserorganismen.
Die aktuelle Gewässerschutzgesetzgebung zur Sicherung angemessener Restwassermengen ist in Art. 29 ff. des Gewässerschutzgesetzes (Bundesgesetz vom 24. Januar 1991 über den Schutz der Gewässer [Gewässerschutzgesetz, GSchG, SR 814.20]) definiert. Eine Übergangsbestimmung für bereits bestehende Wasserkraftkonzessionen wird in Art. 80 bis 83 GSchG beschrieben (Restwassersanierung; Konzession vor 1987 erteilt). Mit der aktuellen Gewässerschutzgesetzgebung sollte sichergestellt werden, dass bis Ende 2007 in allen Fliessgewässerabschnitten eine minimale Restwassermenge fliesst. Die heutigen, seit 1992 in Kraft getretenen Restwasserregelungen stellen einen Kompromiss von wirtschaftlichen und ökologischen Interessen dar. Sie führen deshalb immer wieder zu politischen Kontroversen. Beispielsweise wurde Ende 2003 die Sanierungsfrist für Wasserfassungen von ursprünglich 15 Jahren auf 20 Jahre bis 2012 verlängert.
Um einen Überblick zur bisherigen Umsetzung des quantitativen Gewässerschutzes in der Schweiz zu erhalten, hat die Eawag die Datenbank zu den Wasserfassungen sowie die Sanierungsberichte ausgewertet (UHLMANN & WEHRLI 2006). Diese Eawag-Studie zeigt, dass die Restwassersanierungen (Art. 80 ff. GSchG) in der Schweiz nur zögerlich vorangehen. Der Stand des Vollzugs ist in den einzelnen Kantonen sehr unterschiedlich: Von den insgesamt 491 sanierungspflichtigen Wasserfassungen wurde erst knapp ein Viertel saniert. Wird die Umsetzung vor allem in den Gebirgskantonen nicht beschleunigt, so werden die Restwassersanierungen in der Schweiz auch 2012 nicht abgeschlossen sein. Gemäss einer Diskussionsrunde mit den kantonalen Verantwortlichen sind für die Zielerreichung klare politische Unterstützung und das Bereitstellen finanzieller Mittel erforderlich. Da bei fast 70 Prozent der untersuchten Neukonzessionierungen (Art. 29 ff. GschG) die Dotierwassermenge1 geringer oder entsprechend der Mindestrestwassermenge gemäss Art. 31 Abs. 1 festgelegt wurde, muss angenommen werden, dass die Interessen für die Wasserentnahmen stärker gewichtet werden. Neben einer ökologisch ausreichenden Dotierwassermenge ist insbesondere eine Dynamisierung bzw. saisonale Abstufung derselben unter Berücksichtigung von Hochwasserereignissen erstrebenswert. Diese Regelung fehlt heute weitgehend.
Die Zukunftsaussichten für die Wasserkraft haben sich in jüngster Zeit stabilisiert. Neue Ausbauprojekte wie KWOplus und Linth-Limmern zeigen, dass die Kraftwerkgesellschaften die Zukunft auch in der Veredelung der Energie durch Pumpspeicherkraftwerke erkennen. Neben der reinen Stromerzeugung übernehmen die Schweizer Wasserkraftwerke damit eine wichtige regulierende Funktion im nationalen und europäischen Verbundnetz. Die Wasserkraft dient vermehrt als Puffer gegenüber den Produktionsschwankungen von erneuerbaren Energien wie Wind oder Photovoltaik und kann zudem teuer verkauft werden. Pumpspeicherung in einem weitgehend geschlossenen Wasserkreislauf zwischen zwei Stauseen ist ökonomisch interessant und ökologisch unbedenklich. Wirtschaftliche Argumente gegenüber der Restwassersanierung werden deshalb langfristig an Gewicht verlieren.
Seit Inkrafttreten des GSchG im Jahre 1992 wurde allgemein erkannt, dass neben den Wasserentnahmen in den Fliessgewässern weitere Defizite wie Geschiebemangel, Schwall-Sunk oder ein monotones Abflussregime auf die Vitalität der Fliessgewässerökosysteme einwirken. Das Thema «Schwall-Sunk» wird durch die zunehmende Nutzung der Speicherkraftwerke für die Regelung der internationalen Stromnetze immer wichtiger. Neben der zügigen Umsetzung der Restwasservorschriften haben deshalb neue Lösungen für die Schwall-Sunk-Problematik hohe Priorität. Auf Bundesebene sind neue Regelungen in der Vernehmlassung.

China – an interesting market for decentralized wastewater treatment
The worldwide successful centralized wastewater treatment concept has shown its limits in some developing and transition countries like China. Especially for fast-growing cities with limited water resources the concept is now being challenged. Decentralized sanitation with its modular character is considered to be an effective way in facing rapid urban growth and with its potential to locally reuse water an additional water resource can be tapped. A master thesis from the EPFL Lausanne, supervised by the Swiss water research institute Eawag and supported by the marketing research institute CBC Chinese Business Center from Shanghai and the investment company Emerald Technology Ventures, investigated the market potential in China for membrane based wastewater systems in decentralized application of urban wastewater treatment. A survey with international system suppliers and Chinese experts from authorities, academics, and real estate developer companies has been conducted to acquire relevant information. [...]

China – ein interessanter Markt für dezentrale Kleinkläranlagen
Die konventionelle, zentrale Abwasserreinigung ist ein weltweit erfolgreiches Konzept. In Entwicklungs- und Transformationsländern wie China und insbesondere in wasserarmen Städten mit rasendem Bevölkerungswachstum stößt es jedoch an seine Grenzen. Der modulare Charakter von dezentralen Abwassersystemen gilt als eine effektive Möglichkeit der schnellen Städteentwicklung nachhaltig zu begegnen. Gleichzeitig könnte das gereinigte Abwasser lokal wieder verwendet werden als zusätzliche Wasserressource. Eine Masterarbeit der EPFL Lausanne, betreut durch das Wasserforschungsinstitut Eawag, sowie unterstützt vom Marktforschungsinstitut CBC Chinese Business Center in Shanghai und der Emerald Technology Ventures, erforschte das Marktpotential in China für Kleinkläranlagen mit Membrantechnologie zur Reinigung von städtischem Abwasser. Dazu wurde eine Umfrage bei internationalen Systemanbietern, Chinesischen Behörden, Akademikern und Generalunternehmungen durchgeführt. [...]

River rehabilitation decisions, like other decisions in environmental management, are often taken by authorities without sufficient transparency about how different goals, predictions, and concerns were considered during the decision making process. This can lead to lack of acceptance or even opposition by stakeholders. In this paper, a concept is outlined for the use of techniques of decision analysis to structure scientist and stakeholder involvement in river rehabilitation decisions. The main elements of this structure are (i) an objectives hierarchy that facilitates and stimulates explicit discussion of goals, (ii) an integrative probability network model for the prediction of the consequences of rehabilitation alternatives, and (iii) a mathematical representation of preferences for possible outcomes elicited from important stakeholders. This structure leads to transparency about expectations of outcomes by scientists and valuations of these outcomes by stakeholders and decision makers. It can be used (i) to analyze synergies and conflict potential between stakeholders, (ii) to analyze the sensitivity of alternative-rankings to uncertainty in prediction and valuation, and (iii) as a basis for communicating the reasons for the decision. These analyses can be expected to support consensus-building among stakeholders and stimulate the creation of alternatives with a greater degree of consensus. Because most decisions in environmental management are characterized by similarly complex scientific problems and diverse stakeholders, the outlined methodology will be easily transferable to other settings.

Infrastrukturen sind das Rückgrat der Entwicklung von Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. Sie bieten eine wichtige Grundlage für Wohnen, Arbeiten und Freizeit. Infrastrukturen sind notwendige Bedingungen für die Wirtschaftstätigkeit und das „Leben” im Raum, aber noch nicht hinreichend für deren Ausprägung bzw. Gestaltung. Die Langlebigkeit von Infrastruktursystemen erfordert zu deren Erhalt und zur Weiterentwicklung Planungsstrategien, die es ermöglichen, die maßgeblichen Unsicherheiten bezüglich gesellschaftlichen, ökologischen und technologischen Veränderungen adäquat zu berücksichtigen. Die hochgradig lokal verorteten Infrastrukturen unterliegen in zunehmendem Maße überlokalen Umfeldeinflüssen, die ihre Entwicklung mitbestimmen.
Dieser Beitrag stellt einen strategischen Planungsansatz für nachhaltiges regionales Infrastrukturmanagement am Beispiel von Abwasserinfrastrukturen in der Schweiz vor, um mit den zunehmenden Unsicherheiten in der globalisierten Welt umgehen zu können. Dieser Ansatz ist proaktiv und partizipativ, er überwindet die Folgenfixierung konservativer TA-Ansätze und trägt mit seiner breiten Abstützung zu einer hohen Umsetzungsorientierung der Ergebnisse bei. Ausgehend von den Rigiditäten der Infrastruktur werden Unsicherheiten der zukünftigen Entwicklung skizziert und „Regional Infrastructure Foresight” als geeignetes Instrument vorgestellt.

The liberalization of electricity markets opens up new opportunities for electricity providers to differentiate their products along environmental characteristics. Due to considerable search and evaluation costs for the consumer, the success of green power products depends to a large degree on a professional communication strategy. Besides professional marketing, instruments like environmental labeling have attracted considerable attention. The present paper analyzes the fundamentals of voluntary, third-party eco-labeling of electricity products and compares different labeling approaches, which have been developed in Europe and in the US recently. We distinguish six major dimensions along which labeling schemes can differ and identify two main strategies to deal with the basic tradeoffs, correspondingly. Labeling concepts may either be simple, require low or medium environmental standards and strive for the support of at least one stakeholder group. Alternatively, eco-labels may judge a broad range of environmental impacts and integrate several stakeholder groups with opposing interests. Experiences show that labels of the first type can be set up quickly and have the advantage to set a standard early in the market. In the medium and long term, however, public awareness and potential criticisms may rise and rather simple eco-labeling schemes will have to be adapted. The paper finally discusses the prospects for a common European eco-labeling strategy.

The improved integration of disparate knowledge stocks is one of the key promises of transdisciplinary research. This present paper illustrates the multifaceted characteristics of knowledge integration by analysing the experience gained through a major transdisciplinary research project on green certification procedures for hydropower plants. These lessons learned allow a better understanding of the challenge to manage the diversity of interfaces between different actors and different forms of knowledge.

Wastewater treatment plants (WWTP) are planned and designed for a lifespan of 25 to 40 years. The catchment area, discharge requirements, available technology, institutional conditions, operational procedures etc. of these plants may change drastically over this long time period. In the private sector such dynamic development would possibly be considered in the planning and design phase based on a scenario analysis. However, conducting a scenario process requires knowledge about the driving forces of this dynamic, which at the moment is very limited in the field of urban drainage. In this paper we take a first step in closing this gap. In a case study we analyzed the development of a WWTP and its environment for a time period of over a decade. From this investigation we identified the driving forces responsible for the observed strong dynamic and their effect on the development of the WWTP. Based on the analysis of these forces, we deduce important aspects that will have to be considered in the future if scenario planning is to be applied routinely in the field of urban drainage.

Innovations tend to develop in a non-linear way as they are subject to a complex interplay of structures and processes within a specific innovation field as well as within its socio-technical context. These are, for instance, specific actor constellations and institutional settings at the producer and consumer side, developments in complementary innovation fields or developments at a societal level. Innovation processes are also characterized by cumulative or learning effects, which may lead to path-dependencies and 'lock-in' effects. As a result of this complex interplay, it is often uncertain, which pathway an innovation will take in the future. This holds particularly for innovations at an early development stage and which at the same time present a potentially radical innovation with respect to existing socio-technical structures. This is all the more true, if long-term developments are considered. Uncertainty may refer to the technical characteristics of an innovation, to the future application fields and the user segments and to the interpretation a society or different actor groups may attribute to a technology or service (Pinch & Bijker 1987), that is, to the future shape, function and meaning of an innovation. As a result, it is often uncertain, if an innovation will turn out as a sustainable innovation. This is to say, an innovation may not be considered as sustainable as such, but rather it depends on the specific variation of an innovation as well as its embedding in a specific context, if it will turn out as more or less sustainable.

In this paper we present a future-oriented approach for exploring a range of alternative inno-vation pathways an innovation may take. These pathways are characterised by different variations of the shape, function and meaning of an innovation and by specific developments within as well as in the context of the innovation field at hand, which may contribute to the preva-lence of one variation rather than another. The approach draws on the multi-level concept (Rip & Kemp 1998; Geels 2005). This multi-level concept is particularly well suited for the analysis of long-term developments. It has so far largely been applied for the analysis of transition processes in which a dominant socio-technical system - or regime - is gradually dis- placed by a different regime, either in a historical perspective or, in a future-oriented perspective, searching for possibilities to bring about a desired regime change. In this paper we propose to apply the multi-level framework with an analytical perspective that puts an innovation field centre stage and explores, what are relevant regimes, complementary and competing innovations and developments at the macro level that may influence, which pathway an innovation field will take.

Academic spin-offs have received increasing attention in discussions about science and innovation policy and in research. Most of the attention has been focused on determining the conditions for fostering spin-offs, but this paper shifts the focus back to the potential repercussions for academic institutions. These may result from the involvement of researchers in spin-off processes and from incentives aimed at supporting spin-off activities. In a first step, the paper develops a conceptual framework with which to analyse repercussions that result from the interaction between policy measures for supporting spin-offs and structural features of national science systems. Policy measures and structural aspects of the science systems influence the ways spin-offs and their parent institutions interact. As patterns of linkages differ, so too may their impacts on academic institutions. Secondly, based on secondary analysis of comparative studies, we develop a number of hypotheses as to which repercussions on academic institutions may be expected in a number of European countries. The paper concludes by proposing implications for policy as well as for further research.

Uncertainties about the long-term prospects of urban water management systems have increased substantially over the past decade due to an increasing variety of regulations, technologies, and demand structures. In Switzerland, this uncertainty is mirrored by growing difficulties of utility managers and (waste)water scientists to agree on shared strategies: Water professionals demand support for pressing management problems, while researchers fundamentally question the longer-term sustainability of the established water management system. To reestablish shared orientation, we conducted a foresight study for the Swiss (waste)water sector in 2004. Based on interviews with 29 experts from Swiss water management and research to collect 56 drivers of change, a team of 17 experts developed three scenarios: (A) regional mergers of water utilities leading to enhanced professionalism in the sector, (B) consequent material flows management leading to a radically restructured urban water management system, and (C) generalized financial crisis leading to a breakdown of centralized utility services. These scenarios helped identifying shared research priorities. We conclude that scenario analysis is a powerful tool for framing long-term strategies, defining priorities, and integrating different interests in the multidisciplinary contexts of sustainability science, which are marked by high uncertainties and concern a wide range of stakeholder groups.

The paper presents an actor oriented approach for the analysis of innovation systems. The approach is based on an exploration of actor roles along two different lines. Innovation potentials may be investigated on the basis of firm resources and actual innovation activities may be analyzed with reference to innovation strategies. Furthermore, the analysis can be carried out at different levels. At a meso level, actor groups can be assessed and compared straightforwardly, whereas analyses at the micro level provide a more profound impression of individual actors. Empirically, our analysis will be exemplified in the field of stationary fuel cells.

In this article we sketch a conceptual approach for the analysis of future development options of innovation systems. The so-called variation analysis is based on the exploration of technological variations in the sense of different designs and application contexts and organizational variations with regard to the allocation of major innovation tasks to different actors. In a further step, feasible combinations of these two dimensions are identified on the basis of consistency conditions derived from the characteristics of the innovation system under study. Empirically, we demonstrate the methodology for the case of biogas production by anaerobic digestion, an innovation that, in Switzerland, has reached the take-off phase of diffusion.

Electricity supply is a large technical system, which exhibits strong path dependencies and high barriers for radical innovations. Recent market liberalization, however, has initiated a fundamental restructuring. The paper analyzes how liberalization has altered innovation processes in the field of electricity supply. We examine three radical innovations under monopoly conditions and contrast the findings with the results from a survey on the innovation behavior of electric utilities in liberalized markets. We argue that the selection environment for innovations has changed in various respects. In our sample, new options open to innovation activities have emerged at the level of the firm and utility strategies turn out to be more heterogeneous. This may be interpreted as an increase in the variety of search processes, which may lead to a mid-term decrease of path-dependencies.

Green power products may be seen as a means of fostering renewable energy sources because they create and channel consumer demand for environmentally sound power generation. They can therefore be evaluated on a par with other support instruments regarding their effectiveness to connect new capacity to the grid. Apart from this direct effect however, green power products confer a much more active role for customers and utilities. Thus, learning processes, which foster eco-oriented decisions beyond the construction of new renewable generation capacity, may be induced.
In the present paper, we provide an encompassing review of the ecological consequences of green electricity products. We examine the direct eco-effects by comparing five European countries in their endeavor to increase electricity generation from renewable energy. The results show that the impact of green power on increasing renewable generation capacity is rather limited. In a second step, we analyze the contribution of green power in stimulating eco-oriented learning. It turns out that green power has particular potential in facilitating simultaneous learning processes involving power producers, traders, suppliers and consumers. We conclude that green electricity can be a crucial complement to governmental energy policies in the mid term. A precondition for reaping this potential is the careful policy design to create synergies in the interaction of regulatory support schemes and the green power market.

Utility systems play a key role in a broader project of transforming industrial society for sustainable development. At the same time, these sectors are particularly resistant to change. This is due to strong interlinkages between technological systems, natural resources, institutions and value orientations which stabilise consumption, production and governance patterns and constitute a so-called socio-technical regime (Kemp 1994; Rip and Kemp 1998). The interconnectedness of the elements mentioned and the dependency of modern societies on the provision of utility services make it hard to introduce radically new production and consumption patterns - such as energy provision based on renewable sources, recycling of drinking water or provision contracts based on demand-side management. The high complexity implies that it is difficult to predict the consequences from exchanging parts of the prevailing socio-technical regime.
The large scale introduction of intermittent renewable energy sources such as offshore wind energy in electricity systems is a case in point. As a consequence, incumbent interests may profit from such uncertainties by emphasising risks to the security of supply in order to prevent changes which could endanger their established position. Political power based on the existence of asymmetrical information therefore plays a crucial role in stabilising regimes of utility provision. Some research work and political effort has been put into strategies to transform prevailing socio-technical regimes (Kemp et al. 1998; Summerton 1992; Mayntz and Schneider 1995). [...]

From private car use to car sharing: context changes as facilitators for radical behavioural change

Organised car sharing is considered to be an ecologically promising new mobility offer. Car owners who give up their private car and join a car sharing-organisation change their modal split in favour of public transport, and they significantly reduce their driven car kilometres. But the latest research results only rarely rely on theoretical insights and can, up to date, not clarify if the car sharing-offer itself is attractive enough to evoke such radical behaviour changes, or if the consumer’s attention on car sharing is only attracted if his/her behaviour has already changed for other reasons before. Out of a theoretical, environmental psychology perspective as well as of a directly behaviourally relevant (politically or marketing-oriented) perspective, it is, however, important to clearly separate the effectiveness of a new service offer and the importance of situational conditions and/or personal factors for behaviour changes. As a starting-point for weighting the different elements we conducted a qualitative study. In interviews and group discussions, 39 Swiss car sharing-members were asked about their mobility behaviour before and after having joined a car sharing-organisation as well as their participation motivations. Most important result: Former car owners first underwent significant changes in their personal life context which made them give up the own car, before they became aware of the car sharing-offer and evaluated it. Nevertheless, the car sharing-offer itself is important to stabilise behaviour changes that have already taken place and to hinder former car owners from repurchasing a car in the new life context.

Decision making in environmental management projects is usually complex because of heterogeneous stakeholder interests, multiple objectives, long planning and implementation processes, and uncertain outcomes. Conflicting stakeholder interests in particular are often an important impediment to the realization and success of a project. Multiple criteria decision analysis (MCDA) methods are potentially helpful to support decision making in complex decision situations. They were originally developed to support the individual decision makers to take decisions in a rational manner. However, studies that have applied MCDA methods indicate that users are often skeptical about the value of MCDA methods to support their individual decisions and prefer the freedom of unaided decision making. In addition, there is a lack of studies that have systematically evaluated the strengths of MCDA methods in multiple stakeholder settings. [...]

Die Entscheidungsfindung bei Umweltprojekten ist schwierig wegen unterschiedlichen Interessenspositionen der beteiligten Akteure, sich gegenseitig beeinträchtigenden Zielen, langen Planungs- und Umsetzungsphasen und grossen Unsicherheiten in den Auswirkungen. Besonders unterschiedliche Interessenspositionen verzögern oder verhindern oftmals ein Planungsprojekt. Multikriterienmethoden können bei komplexen Entscheidungssituationen eine mögliche Unterstützung bieten. Ursprünglich wurden diese Methoden für einen einzelnen Entscheidungsträgers entwickelt, um aufzuzeigen, wie rationale Entscheide getroffen werden können. Verschiedene Studien haben jedoch gezeigt, dass die Entscheidungsträger gegenüber den Multikriterienmethoden kritisch eingestellt sind, und ihre individuellen Entscheidungen lieber ohne formale Entscheidungshilfe treffen. Hingegen wurden bisher nur sehr wenige Studien durchgeführt, welche den Nutzen der Methoden für die Konfliktlösung systematisch untersucht haben. [...]

Decision making in environmental projects is usually complex because of heterogeneous stakeholder interests, multiple objectives, long planning and implementation processes, and uncertain outcomes. Conflicting stakeholder interests in particular are often an important impediment to the realization and success of projects. Multiple criteria decision analysis (MCDA) methods are potentially useful for facilitating conflict resolution among stakeholder groups. However, some studies that have applied MCDA methods indicate that users are often skeptical about the value of MCDA methods and prefer the freedom of unaided decision making. We examine whether and how multi-attribute value theory (MAVT), a particular kind of MCDA, facilitates conflict resolution in environmental projects. Therefore, the MAVT method is applied to a specific river rehabilitation project in Switzerland (Thur River). The main questions are: (1) Can the MAVT method predict the final preferences of stakeholders and therefore anticipate conflicts at an early stage? (2) Do stakeholders reconsider and change their preferences after using the MAVT method? (3) If they do, does this result in more consensus-oriented decisions? We find that the principal advantage of the method in our case was not the prediction of stakeholders' final preferences, but rather the methods' ability to facilitate more consensus-oriented decisions. The paper discusses possible reasons for this finding and concludes with recommendations for future applications of the MAVT method in environmental decision making.

The decision making process in river rehabilitation is complex. It is characterized by multiple objectives, multiple stakeholders ad a high uncertainty in the outcome. Multicriteria decision making approaches can offer helpful methods when faced with the problem of conflicting objectives and uncertain outcomes. However, there is a lack of tested methods to incorporate stakeholder values explicitly in decision making. The current study combines multi-attribute value theory (MAVT) with stakeholder classification to estimate the conflict potential for different rehabilitation alternatives at the Thur River in Switzerland. We elicited values from representatives of eight major stakeholder groups ad classified the stakeholder groups based on their influence potential. The results indicate that such a combination of methods can help to identify potential conflicts ad create alternatives that are likely to have a higher degree of consensus. In our case study, a potential consensus solution consisted of seeking to achieve a combination of different objectives, including improvement in ecological status and flood protection as well as preservation of agricultural activity. The proposed solution would not result in maximum gain for ecological status ad flood protection, however river rehabilitation would still achieve major improvement compared to status quo, and conflict potential is estimated to be significantly lower in comparison to other alternatives.

Access to sufficient and safe drinking water and sanitation is a key issue of sustainable development. In 2000 the General Assembly of the United Nations established the Millennium Development Goals, which express the need to halve the proportion of people without access to safe drinking water by 2015 (United Nations 2000). This goal was confirmed and extended by the Johannesburg Declaration on Sustainable Development, which also incorporated the issue of access to basic sanitation (United Nations 2002).
One approach to support these objectives might be private-sector participation (PSP) in the provision of water and sanitation. PSP is often perceived as a way to tap new financial sources for rehabilitation and expansion of plants or networks or to improve operational efficiency, since conventional economic analysis states that production efficiency is lower in public than in private enterprises (Boyco et al. 1996: 309). This holds true especially for local public providers in permanent monopolies compared with usually large, internationally experienced private operators being awarded contracts in competitive bidding processes.
However, experience gained in recent PSP projects all over the world shows that this argument is too generalised to guarantee high-quality water services in the long term. Conventional analysis focuses on a cost-benefit analysis of the service provision itself; that is, the emphasis is solely on marginal production costs, with the costs and benefits of maintaining and reforming the institutional setting (i.e. the regulatory framework or the allocation of responsibilities) tending to be neglected. [...]

Versorgungssektoren stehen in einem besonderen Verhältnis zum Thema gesellschaftlicher Fragilität. Einerseits gelten sie seit Jahrzehnten als Garanten einer stabilen Grundversorgung von Bevölkerung und Wirtschaft mit alltäglichen Notwendigkeiten wie Wasser, Gas, Strom oder Telekommunikationsleistungen. Andererseits wurden die Versorgungssektoren in den letzten Jahren grundlegenden Reformen unterworfen, deren längerfristige Auswirkungen noch weitgehend offen sind. Es stellt sich damit die Frage, wie Optionen zur Transformation von Versorgungssystem analysiert, bewertet und deren Umsetzung begleitet werden können, sodass eine künftige nachhaltige Struktur entstehen kann die insbesondere nicht zu einer erhöhten gesellschaftlichen Fragilität führen wird. Die hier vorgestellte Sustainability-Foresight-Methode formuliert einen Vorschlag, wie eine solche Analyse für die Entwicklung des Versorgungssektors entwickelt werden kann, indem bewusst Erwartungen und Visionen unterschiedlicher Akteursgruppen identifiziert und in einem gemeinsamen Dialog zu Orientierungsbildern rekonstruiert werden. Ziel des Verfahrens ist es nicht, „nachhaltige Versorgung” per Forschung im Detail vorzuschreiben, sondern Prozeduren zu entwickeln, mit denen die Transformation der Versorgungssektoren gesellschaftlich reflektierter gestaltet werden kann.

The Swiss sanitary engineering is facing increasing uncertainty. New impurities, new regulations, new technologies, and changed supply and demand structures lead to the fact that prognosis based on a linear continuation of today’s condition are being questioned more and more. Long-term planning is getting difficult. In addition, more drastic changing processes have to prepared on a long run, since sanitary engineering can hardly be adapted to changed social demands, new technical developments or risks in the short term because of its complexity and the durability of the technical equipment.

Utility systems for the provision of electricity, gas, water or telecommunication are at the interface of society and nature. They are of central importance for sustainable development but particularly difficult to shape. Large technical systems are intertwined with patterns of market organisation, administrative institutions, user routines and policy networks. Transformation is not matter of planning and control but of co-evolution across such heterogeneous domains. The transformation of utility systems thus exemplifies the limits of conventional steering approaches to achieve sustainable development. Shaping strategies are needed which take up uncertainty, ambivalence and distributed influence as basic features of shaping sustainable development. Sustainability Foresight represents a method that is currently being probed in German utility systems.

Nachhaltige Entwicklung erfordert Transformationen in Produktion, Konsum und Politik, um wirtschaftliche Aktivitäten mit ökologischen und sozialen Grenzen in Einklang zu bringen. Bestehende industrielle Strukturen sind eng mit ihrer Umwelt verflochten. Deshalb geht es dabei um weit reichende strukturelle Wandlungsprozesse, in denen soziale, technische und ökologische Faktoren über mehrere Ebenen zusammenwirken. Insbesondere die Modelle der neoklassischen Ökonomie, die sonst gerne für Politikanalyse und -beratung verwendet werden, kommen in solchen Situationen schnell an die Grenzen ihrer Modellannahmen (Witt 1999). Dafür gewinnt das Konzept der Ko-Evolution für Transformationsprozesse an der Schnittstelle von Gesellschaft, Technik und Natur an Bedeutung (Norgaard 1994). Doch wie lässt sich Ko-Evolution gestalten? [...]

Hydropower is the most important renewable electricity source worldwide. It shows clear advantages for the global CO₂ balance but creates serious ecological impacts on a local scale. As a consequence, concern for the conservation of natural river ecosystems is growing within society and more people are willing to pay extra for so-called ‘green electricity’. The definition of ‘green’, however, is not straightforward and customers cannot directly examine the quality of electricity products. Therefore, credible certification of high ecological standards is essential for successful green electricity marketing.
In this paper we introduce a new assessment procedure for evaluating environmentally compatible hydropower production. This so-called ‘Green Hydro’ concept was developed in the context of a multidisciplinary case study on a 400 MW hydropower scheme in the Southern Alps of Switzerland. The concept guarantees both general standards for different schemes operating in different types of watersheds and flexibility for local particularities. We developed an environmental management matrix that considers basic criteria and eco-investments and covers five environmental areas of concern (i.e. hydrological character, connectivity, morphology, landscape, and biological communities). The ecological perspective is complemented by five management domains (i.e. instream flow regimes, hydropeaking, reservoir and bedload management, and power plant structures). Applying assessment and modelling tools for the Green Hydro procedure showed that dynamic habitat models allowed quantification of the effects of different instream flow regulations at morphologically distinct sites. In this case, morphological restoration could be more beneficial than increasing the minimum flow.
The first experience with the Green Hydro certification is encouraging. So far, 13 facilities have successfully passed the certification procedure. They produce a total of 186 GWh green electricity per year, which is sufficient for the supply of almost 40 000 households in Switzerland.

Fliessgewässer sind wie kaum ein anderes Ökosystem durch massive menschliche Nutzungen gestört. Insbesondere in Europa hat die Verbauung der Flusslandschaften eine sehr lange Tradition. Als sich im Laufe der 1980er Jahre jedoch ein starkes Umweltbewusstsein etablierte, wuchs auch die Zahl der Fliessgewässerrevitalisierungen kontinuierlich. Seit Anfang der 1990er Jahre entwickelte sich ein regelrechter Revitalisierungsboom und entsprechend rasant stiegen die finanziellen, personellen und wissenschaftlichen Anstrengungen auf diesem Gebiet. Im krassen Gegensatz dazu steht die mangelhafte und oft unvollständige Evaluation der einzelnen Projekte. Ihr Erfolg oder Misserfolg wurde in vielen Fällen weder unter ökologischen Gesichtspunkten noch unter dem Aspekt des Projektmanagements hinreichend analysiert. Insbesondere fehlten einheitliche Standards und Konzepte, um die unterschiedlichen Projekte miteinander vergleichen zu können. Damit gingen wertvolle Informationen verloren, die für eine effektive und effiziente Planung zukünftiger Projekt dringend nötig wären. [...]

Rivers and streams are among those ecosystems with the largest anthropogenic impacts. Especially in Europe the regulation of rivers has a very long tradition. With growing ecological concerns the number of river restoration projects has increased steadily since the early 1980s and restoration activities reached a veritable boom phase during the 1990s. Financial and personal resources allocated for such projects were increasing in parallel with scientific activities in this field. The evaluation of individual restoration projects, however, remained quite inadequate. Success and failure under ecological and management aspects was rarely analyzed at a professional level. Good practice codes and common standards for comparing different projects are still missing. Valuable information for an efficient planning of future projects is lost this way. [...]

"Grüner Strom" weist als Konsumgut wenig diffusionsfördernde Merkmale auf, besonders weil die ökologischen Eigenschaften weder der Wahrnehmung zugänglich noch physikalisch beim Konsum vorhanden sind. Es werden drei angewandte Studien vorgestellt, welche die Potentiale von Pilot- und Demonstrationsprojekten zur Beeinflussung der Einstellungen gegenüber Grünem Strom und erneuerbaren Energien untersuchen. (1) Eine Fokusgruppenstudie (N=76) versuchte, die Einstellungsbildung während einer Informations- und Marketingkampagne nachzubilden. (2) Eine Folgestudie mit Tiefeninterviews (N=16) fokussierte das Informationspotential eines zertifizierten Wasserkraftwerkes für die lokale Bevölkerung. (3) Eine Fragebogenstudie (N=94) untersuchte die Effekte eines Solar-Demonstrationsprojekts einer Schule auf die Einstellungen gegenüber alternativen Energien in der lokalen Bevölkerung. Ein Versuch eine Synthese der drei Studien zu erstellen, deutet in Richtung einer Relativierung von Extrempositionen durch zunehmendes Sachwissen. Unterschiedliche Strategiebausteine der drei Studien werden identifiziert und bezüglich ihrer Praxisrelevanz diskutiert.

In the present chapter, we have shown how transition theory might be fruitfully applied in order to discuss ongoing transformations in the utility sectors. The analysis of landscapes, regimes and niches helps to focus on stabilizing forces and to develop an integrated view of processes spanning consumption, production and regulation in order to identify future development paths, barriers and windows of opportunity. This step is an important precondition for identifying and assessing more sustainable futures of these utility sectors. [...]

Electricity supply systems represent typical examples of large technical systems. As a consequence they tend to exhibit strong path dependencies and high barriers for radical innovations. Still some cases of radical transformations can be reported in recent years. However they were mainly induced by strong impulses from outside the sector. Recently, market liberalization has initiated a fundamental restructuring of the organizational standards both within and between firms. The present paper focuses on the question how market liberalization has altered the innovation characteristics of the electricity supply system. Our focus is on radical innovations and we ask whether recent changes have increased the degrees of freedom for innovative activity and thus broaden the range of development paths pursued. The paper is based on an interview series with electric utilities in Germany, Switzerland and the Netherlands. Our analysis shows that the rules for the selection of innovations have changed in various respects. New degrees of freedom have emerged and utility strategies turn out to be more heterogeneous than they were under monopoly conditions. The changes may be interpreted as a general increase in the search behavior of the sector and therefore a potential decrease in path dependency.

Market liberalization has triggered fundamental changes in the electricity sector with far-reaching economic, technical, organizational and ecological consequences. The paper examines how electricity market liberalization has influenced innovation processes at the level of electric utilities and in the electricity sector as a whole. The results are based on an empirical survey including two case studies, green power and fuel cells, in which utility innovation strategies were analysed. From the similarities in both cases and the aggregated effects of innovation strategies, we identify several indications for a general change of innovation processes in the sector: the innovation activity has increased, there is a greater variety of innovation projects, product innovations and organizational innovations have gained importance, innovation networks have become smaller and more specific, and the professionalism of innovation management is improving.

River rehabilitation decisions, like other decisions in environmental management, are often taken by authorities without sufficient transparency about how different goals, outcomes, and concerns were considered during the decision making process. This can lead to lack of acceptance or even opposition by stakeholders. In this paper, a concept is outlined for the use of techniques of decision analysis to structure scientist and stakeholder involvement in river rehabilitation decisions. The main elements of this structure are (i) an objectives hierarchy that facilitates explicit discussion of goals, (ii) an integrative probability network model for the prediction of the consequences of rehabilitation alternatives, and (iii) a mathematical representation of preferences for possible outcomes elicited from important stakeholders. This structure leads to transparency about expectations of outcomes by scientists and valuations of these outcomes by stakeholders and can be used (i) to analyse synergies and conflict potential between stakeholders, (ii) to analyse the sensitivity of alternative-rankings to uncertainty in prediction and valuation, and (iii) as a basis for communicating the reasons for the decision. These analyses can be expected to stimulate the creation of alternatives with a greater degree of consensus among stakeholders. The paper concentrates on the overall concept, the objectives hierarchy and the design of the integrative model. More details about the integrative model, the stakeholder involvement process, and the assessment of results will be published separately. Because many decisions in environmental management are characterized by a complex scientific problem and diverse stakeholders, the outlined methodology will be easily transferable to other settings.

Strategisches Nischenmanagement ist ein wichtiges Instrument zur Gestaltung von Transitionsstrategien. Es ist ein theoriebasierter Ansatz für die Planung, Durchführung und Bewertung von Experimenten mit neuen Technologien, die sich zur Lösung drängender gesellschaftlicher Probleme eignen, sich aber von alleine nicht am Markt durchsetzen. Am Beispiel nachhaltiger Mobilität wird erläutert, wie Strategisches Nischenmanagement Transitionsstrategien unterstützen kann.

Langfristiger Wandel in sozio-technischen Systemen kann nicht prognostiziert und gesteuert werden. Ein gesellschaftlich reflektierter Umgang mit diesen Veränderungen ist dennoch möglich und notwendig, um nachhaltige Pfade zu identifizieren und riskante Sackgassen zu vermeiden. Ansätze dafür bietet die Sustainability Foresight Methode.

Infolge der Liberalisierung der Elektrizitätsmärkte hat sich der Umgang mit neuen Technologien und Produkten verändert. Zu Monopolzeiten fand die Beschäftigung mit technologischen Neuerungen vor allem auf der Branchenebene statt. Mitarbeiter von Versorgungsunternehmen tauschten beispielsweise ihre Erfahrungen aus Pilotprojekten in Arbeitskreisen, die von Wirtschaftsverbänden koordiniert wurden, aus. Im liberalisierten Markt stehen die Elektrizitätsunternehmen heute vor der Herausforderung, eigene Wege im Umgang mit Innovationen zu beschreiten. Dazu gehört, dass man gezielt neue Problemlösungen sucht, innovative Technologien hinsichtlich ihrer Potenziale und Risiken bewertet und ggf. deren Markteinführung vorantreibt. Das Innovationsmanagement einzelner Unternehmen tritt damit an die Stelle von gemeinsam entwickelten Einstellungen und einer abgestimmten Vorgehensweise auf der Sektorebene. [...]

Die Liberalisierung des Elektrizitätsmarktes hat zu einem tief greifenden, wirtschaftlichen Wandel in einem Sektor geführt, dessen technologische und ökonomische Entwicklung über Jahrzehnte von einem hohen Maß an Stabilität gekennzeichnet war. Durch die Einführung von Wettbewerb in den Bereichen Stromerzeugung, Handel und Vertrieb werden die Elektrizitätsversorgungsunternehmen (EVUs), die traditionell als Monopolisten agierten, mit grundlegend neuen Herausforderungen konfrontiert. Eine strategische Handlungsoption ist eine verstärkte Innovationstätigkeit, d.h. die gezielte Entwicklung, Einführung und Durchsetzung von neuen Produkten oder Technologien am Markt.
Viele der heute eingesetzten Technologien zur Stromerzeugung sind mit negativen Umwelteffekten verbunden, etwa in Form von Schadstoff- oder Treibhausgas-Emissionen, radioaktiven Abfällen oder Eingriffen in Gewässersysteme. Im Sinne einer langfristig tragfähigen Entwicklung besteht die Notwendigkeit, die negativen Umweltfolgen durch geeignete Maßnahmen zu verringern. Ökologische Innovationen wie etwa neue Technologien zur Nutzung erneuerbarer Energiequellen oder zur Effizienzsteigerung von Energieumwandlungsprozessen können hier einen wichtigen Beitrag leisten. [...]

Market liberalization has triggered far-reaching changes in the electricity sector. The introduction of competition in the fields of power generation, power trading and sales represents a fundamental challenge for incumbent utilities, which were used to operate in a monopolistic market environment. Today, the companies have to reduce costs, improve customer-orientation and differentiate from competitors. The development and market introduction of new products and technologies is a promising strategic option in this respect.
Most established technologies for electricity generation cause negative environmental impacts such as resource depletion, air emissions, radioactive waste or the destruction of aquatic eco-systems. Ecological innovations, which contribute to a reduction of environmental impacts, may play a key role in order to establish a more sustainable electricity supply system in future. [...]

The provision of drinking water and sanitation is a key problem of sustainable development. In recent years private-sector participation (PSP) has been proposed as a major solution to solve efficiency problems and lack ofinvestment in this sector. In this paper, we analyse PSP contracts from a new institutional economics (NIE) perspective. The NIE approach implies that contract settings with high transaction costs lead to increased risks of opportunistic behaviour for the contract parties. In application to the water and sanitation (WATSAN) sector, we show that long-term contracts-which seem superior from a mere efficiency viewpointtend to lead to inferior solutions regarding overall welfare effects. These findings are supported by empirical evidence from recent PSP experiences, especially from developing countries. As a solution, a stepwise approach leading from short-term to longerterm, more encompassing contracts might help to mitigate many of the identified transaction cost problems.

Hydropower use is responsible for a wide range of environmental disturbances to river systems. Over the past decades, aquatic science research has been successful in identifying a considerable number of relationships that exist between plant operation and ecosystem quality. This increase in scientific knowledge was, however, not matched by a corresponding reduction in environmental impacts stemming from hydropower. In the present paper, we show how aquatic science projects may be defined and implemented to better link scientific knowledge with the resolution of environmental problems.
We base our analysis on a major aquatic science research project in which an eco-label for "sustainable hydropower" (Green Hydropower) was developed for Switzerland. We first assess the state of aquatic science research on alpine river systems. The Swiss history of hydropower shows that the limited adoption of this knowledge was due to a severe coordination and action problem. The Green Hydropower project aimed at establishing an environmental product label for hydropower plant operation, which should help overcome these problems. It had to deal with two major challenges: the integration of widely differing knowledge stocks and the management of a network of diverse stakeholders operating in a conflict-laden political environment. By carefully dealing with these two problem areas, the project was finally able to define a scientifically-based and broadly-accepted standard for Green Hydropower operation. We conclude by discussing lessons for the improvement of problem-oriented aquatic science research, in general.

CIRUS untersucht ökologische Gestaltungspotenziale von Versorgungssektoren vor dem Hintergrund eines sozio-technischen und institutionellen Ansatzes. Die Forschungsschwerpunkte bilden Innovationsprozesse sowie die Rolle von Nutzern und institutionellen Strukturen im Hinblick auf die Gestaltung einer nachhaltigen Versorgung. Forschungsprojekte werden oft in einer transdisziplinären Perspektive angegangen.

Users play an essential role in the early development and diffusion phases of an innovation. Citizen groups may directly influence user-relevant characteristics of a new technology. They may actively engage in the social construction of quality characteristics, the perception of costs and the development of specific use forms and product images. By this they create ‘technological niches’ where essential learning processes for the further development of the technology may take place. This contribution may not be copied by more professional actors or, if so, only with considerable difficulty. This article illustrates these claims by referring to the development of a user-led innovation and diffusion process in the domain of individual transport: the emergence of organized car sharing in Switzerland. This innovation started in two neighbourhood-based experiments in the late 1980s. Today, it is run by a professional service enterprise, serves some 50,000 customers around the country and continues to expand at a considerable pace. The article highlights the specific contribution of users in the starting phase of organized car sharing and asks how the role of the users changed in the course of the market expansion process. It concludes by discussing the contributions of these experiences to the promotion of sustainable transport.

As in many other European countries, green electricity is an emerging product in Switzerland as well. Although the market is yet to be liberalised, more than 100 of the 1200 Swiss electric utilities offer some sort of green electricity product to their customers. Successful companies like the municipal utilities of the cities of Zurich and Berne have reached customer response rates of up to 4%, while still maintaining cost-based pricing, i.e. charging their customers price premiums of 400-700% per kWh. While most of the products still rely on mainly photovoltaics, some utilities have started to introduce mixed green electricity products also including wind power. With a share of 60% in the Swiss generation mix, hydropower's role in the green electricity mix was also an issue to emerge causing controversial debate. While being renewable, hydropower is not considered environmentally benign by all the stakeholders, and unlike new renewables (solar, wind, biomass), there is little room for new hydropower generation facilities in Switzerland. The green electricity labelling scheme "Naturemade" tackles that issue. The labelling organisation has evolved from a process with broad stakeholder involvement, which included environmental NGOs, scientific institutions, green electricity providers, renewable energy advocates, government bodies and consumer organisations. The analysis in this paper is based on a diffusion theory framework. It identifies and characterises different phases of (past and future) market development, and stresses the importance of eco-labelling as a tool to facilitate the transition from niche to mass market. Finally, we also discuss conclusions that can be drawn from the Swiss case towards market development and labelling on a European level.

Integrated water management is a perspective for effective and efficient protection and utilization concepts for water. On the one hand, individual demands, such as water quality or flood protection, need to be coordinated and optimized; on the other, integrated water management deals with ecological-economic optimization of specific uses such as hydroelectric power generation. This article presents some basic principles and tools to implement integrated water management.

Das Projekt "Ökostrom aus Wasserkraft" setzt in der Entwicklung der EAWAG eine Wegmarke. Es ist als Querprojekt angelegt und folgt damit einem Konzept, das im neuen Verständnis der EAWAG eine wichtige Rolle spielt. Gewässermanagement versteht sich heute als transdisziplinäre Aufgabe, verbindet die Anliegen der Nutzung und des Schutzes und berücksichtigt dabei ökologische, ökonomische und soziale Interessen. - Was bezweckt die EAWAG mit Querprojekten, welche Ergebnisse bringt das Projekt Ökostrom und was hat es uns gelehrt?

Nach längeren niederschlagsfreien Perioden wird das Trinkwasser der Gemeinde Gordola knapp. Insbesondere der sehr trockene Sommer 1991 veranlasste die Gemeinde dazu, die Zukunft der Trinkwasserversorgung längerfristig zu planen. Um ein teures Grundwasserpumpwerk zu umgehen, wurde nach anderen Möglichkeiten zur Gewährleistung des Trinkwasserbedarfs gesucht. Mittels verbrauchslenkenden Massnahmen bei privaten WasserbezügerInnen soll das Wassersparpotential untersucht werden.
Durch Umfragen bei Gewerbe und Haushalten, Daten aus dem statistischen Jahrbuch des Kantons Tessin und weiterer Literatur wird ein Einblick in das momentane Verbrauchsverhalten der Bevölkerung und die aktuelle Situation in der Gemeinde gewonnen. Folgende Problembereiche haben sich daraus ergeben:
• Heisse und trockene Sommermonate führen zu ausgiebiger Bewässerung der Grünflächen.
• Durch den grossen Touristenstrom im Sommer steigt der Wasserbedarf.
• Die meisten Kühlanlagen werden immer noch mit Wasser betrieben.
• Die Bevölkerung ist wenig auf die Wassersparthematik sensibilisiert. [...]

Although foresighting has gained widespread acceptance in the context of strategy formulation in industry and governments, its actual impact on technology development remains unclear. The authors propose the approach of strategic niche management in order to couple longterm visions more tightly with short-term and medium-term action. Such coupling, they argue, is strengthened by developing technological niches: i.e. protected spaces in which learning about the technology takes place and its embedding in society can be observed and tested before large-scale diffusion begins. Real-world experiments with new technologies are a major instrument for developing technological niches. Empirical illustration is taken from recent attempts at sustainable technology development in the realm of individual transportation. Many foresighting exercises have identified the electrification of the vehicle drive train as a promising route. Three major experiments with alternative approaches to the electrification of cars-battery-run vehicles, hybrid vehicles and fuel cell vehicles-will be compared with regard to the coupling of 'viewing' and 'doing'. Based on the analysis of these examples, the authors claim that the development of scenarios without an explicit dedication to taking action risks the generation of more confusion than guidance; similarly, experimentation without taking a long-term view will result in very mediocre results, with limited practical impact on sustainable development.

Integriertes Gewässermanagement ist eine Perspektive für wirksame und effiziente Schutz- und Nutzungskonzepte. Es geht einerseits darum, die gewässerbezogenen Sachpläne - z.B. zur Entwicklung der Gewässerqualität und des Hochwasserschutzes in einem Flusseinzugsgebiet - gegenseitig abzustimmen und zu optimieren. Anderseits befasst sich integriertes Gewässermanagement mit der ökologisch-ökonomischen Optimierung spezifischer Nutzungen wie der Wasserkraftgewinnung. Im vorliegenden Artikel werden Grundprinzipien und Instrumente vorgestellt, die zur Umsetzung des integrierten Gewässermanagements beitragen können.

La gestion intégrée des eaux représente une approche d'avenir mettant en jeu les notions de protection et d'exploitation de manière efficace et compétente. Elle prévoit d'une part d'accorder et d'optimiser les différents plans sectoriels relatifs aux eaux, p. ex. visant à améliorer simultanément de la qualité des cours d'eau et la protection contre les crues dans un bassin fluvial. La gestion intégrée se préoccupe d'autre part de l'optimisation à la fois écologique et économique de certains usages de l'eau comme l'exploitation de l'énergie hydraulique. Dans le présent article sont exposés les principes de base et les instruments qui devraient contribuer à une bonne application de cette approche innovatrice de la gestion des eaux.

Auen sind aufgrund ihrer ökologischen Vielfalt wichtige Landschaftselemente, die in vielen mitteleuropäischen Ländern unter Schutz gestellt wurden. Durch anthropogene Beeinträchtigungen, wie zum Beispiel Verbauungen oder Raumkonkurrenz durch verschiedenen Nutzungen, sind sie stark dezimiert worden. In der Schweiz spielt die Wasserkraftnutzung eine entscheidende Rolle und die inventarisierten Auen von nationaler Bedeutung sollen besonders geschützt und renaturiert werden. Diese Arbeit konzentriert sich auf die Vorstellung der allgemeinen Problematik der Auen. Für die in der Praxis oft schwierige Umsetzung der Schutzziele, muss der ökologische Zustand der Aue beschrieben werden. Dazu werden an die Komplexität der Auen angepasste Klassifizierungs- und Bewertungsverfahren benötigt, die ökologische Wirkungsfaktoren der Auen mit einbeziehen. Die zur Erstellung eines Be-wertungsverfahrens relevanten Schritten sollen dargestellt und der Einfluss der Was-serkraftnutzung auf das Grundwasser untersucht werden. Aus den ökologischen Wirkungsfaktoren der natürlichen Aue müssen Indikatoren bestimmt werden, die als Bewertungskriterien verwendet werden können. Damit können der ökologische Zustand der Aue beschrieben und die zur Renaturierung notwendigen Maßnahmen ausgewählt werden. Eine Klassifizierung, deren Einteilung auf der Kombination ausgewählter Indikatoren basiert, wird der Komplexität der Auen am meisten gerecht und kann als Basis zur Erstellung eines Bewertungsverfahrens genutzt werden.
Ein charakteristischer Indikator ist das hoch anstehende und stark schwankende Grundwasser. Im Rahmen einer Fallstudie in der mittleren Aue im Blenio-Tal (Tes-sin, Schweiz) sollte der Einfluss der Wasserkraftnutzung auf das Grundwasser untersucht werden. Die Analyse der relevanten Einflussfaktoren wurde anhand von chemischen Parametern und Isotopenverhältnissen durchgeführt. Die Kombination der Sulfatkonzentrationen mit den Sauerstoffisotopenverhältnissen liefert eine deutliche Charakterisierung des Zusammenhangs zwischen Abflussdynamik und Auengrundwasser, die zur Beurteilung des Kraftwerkseinflusses herangezogen werden können. Besonders bei höherem Abfluss konnte sowohl ein direkter Austausch des Grundwassers mit dem Flusswasser als auch ein hydraulischer Anschluss festgestellt werden. Die Reduktion des Abflusses durch die Wasserkraftnutzung hat aufgrund der Ergebnisse dieser Studie einen Einfluss auf die Grundwasserverhältnisse in der Aue.

Floodplains are important elements of our landscape because of their great ecological diversity. In most of Central-European countries they have been protected. During the recent decades anthropogenic degradation, e.g. construction or competition with other utilizations, has decimated the floodplains. In Switzerland the influence of hydroelectric power stations plays an important role and inventoried floodplains of national importance should be protected. This study gives an introduction to the floodplain related difficulties in general. For the practical implementation of protection aims one needs to describe the ecological condition of the floodplain. Therefore, classification and assessment techniques adapted to the variety of the floodplains are necessary. The steps taken for creation of assessment techniques should be described and the influence of hydropower on the groundwater should be examined. Assessment qualified indicators have to be defined for the description of the ecological condition of the floodplain. Consequently renaturation measures could be chosen. A classification technique based on an indicator combination will best embrace the variety of floodplains and could be used as a firm basis for assessment techniques.
Generally high groundwater level and high fluctuation of the groundwater in the floodplains are examples for characteristic indicators. In the context of a case study in the middle floodplain of the Blenio Valley (Tessin, Switzerland), the influence of hydropower use on groundwater should be investigated. The participating factors were described by chemical parameters and isotope ratios. The combination of sulfate concentrations and oxygen isotope ratios provide a precise characterization of the context between runoff dynamics and the groundwater in the floodplain which could be used for hydropower influence estimation. Especially during higher runoff, both a direct interchange between groundwater and riverwater and a hydraulic connection were determined. The runoff reduction originated by the hydropower stations in the valley as a result of this study has an influence on the groundwater conditions in the middle floodplain.

The liberalization of electricity markets opens up new opportunities for electricity providers to differentiate their products along environmental characteristics. Due to considerable search and evaluation costs for the consumer, the success of green power products depends to a large degree on a professional communication strategy. Besides professional marketing, instruments like environmental labeling have attracted considerable attention. The present paper analyzes the fundamentals of voluntary, third-party eco-labeling of electricity products and compares different labeling approaches, which have been developed in Europe and in the US recently. We distinguish six major dimensions along which labeling schemes can differ and identify two main strategies to deal with the basic tradeoffs, correspondingly. Labeling concepts may either be simple, require low or medium environmental standards and strive for the support of at least one stakeholder group. Alternatively, eco-labels may judge a broad range of environmental impacts and integrate several stakeholder groups with opposing interests. Experiences show that labels of the first type can be set up quickly and have the advantage to set a standard early in the market. In the medium and long term, however, public awareness and potential criticisms may rise and rather simple eco-labeling schemes will have to be adapted. The paper finally discusses the prospects for a common European eco-labeling strategy.

Hydropower is a renewable source of energy of which ecological benefits include very low average greenhouse gas emissions. As a result of dams, however, more than 20% of all freshwater fish species are now considered threatened or endangered. Such negative ecological impacts are a focus of broad public concern in Alpine regions where hydropower production is most intense. The liberalization of electricity markets now provides an economic rationale for selling hydropower as green energy. This offers an opportunity to improve the ecological performance of hydropower plants. The lessons learned from this large-scale economic and ecological experiment in the industrialized world might be important in other mountain regions where hydropower production is being developed or needs ecological upgrading. As a step in this direction, the present paper gives an overview of recent developments in Europe concerned with the ecolabeling of hydropower. Different initiatives for green hydropower in liberalized electricity markets are discussed, followed by analysis of the shortcomings of simplistic ecolabels. Finally, a new method for ecological assessment of green hydropower plants in outlined. This is currently being implemented in Switzerland along with ecolabeling.

Markets for green products have received considerable attention in many countries recently. Organic food, for instance, is gaining increasingly important market shares, and other product sectors are following suit (Villiger et. al. 2000). The liberalization of electricity markets has also opened up opportunities for electric power companies to differentiate their products in the marketplace. Conventional electric utilities, as well as new Green Power marketers and traders, have begun to develop Green Power products (Loskow 1998; Holt 1997). As in other Green Goods markets, quality control is a key success factor. Recently, a number of Green Power certification initiatives have emerged, aimed at assessing and communicating environmental benefits of Green Power products (Markard and Truffer 1999). Worldwide, about a dozen labeling schemes exist today.
Hydropower has an ambivalent position among electricity generation technologies, which are included in Green Power products. This ambivalence is reflected in the variety of criteria used to identify Green Hydropower plants. Most labeling schemes set a limit at generating capacity. Others restrict admission to old plants and do not want to support new projects. However, from an environmental standpoint, neither capacity nor construction date has ecological significance. An environmentally-motivated and scientifically-derived set of criteria would correspond better to the needs of a trustworthy eco-label. [...]

The existing system of land-based transport based on the individual use of automobiles for passenger transport and trucks for freight transport is not sustainable. Problems of pollution and congestion are pressing public authorities to take action but this is far from easy. One reason why it so difficult for authorities to do something about transport-related problems is that there appear to be no attractive alternatives. Sustainable technologies that fulfil important user requirements in terms of performance and price are most often not available on the market. Ideas of what might be more sustainable technologies and systems exist, but the long development times, uncertainty about market demand and social gains, and the need for change at different levels - in organisation, technology, infrastructure and the wider social and institutional context - provide a great barrier. This paper offers a way to escape the gridlock by engaging in what we call "Strategic Niche Management" (SNM). SNM aims at taking the new technologies to the market place to try and use them in selected settings - niches - by real users. The niches consist of domains of application in which the technology (or new mobility system) is already attractive to use due to specific circumstances (a local problem or the availability of specific, low cost resources). Experiences in the niche are then used to inform decisions about technical improvement and support policies, aimed at expanding the original niche and making a transition towards a more sustainable transport system. The protected space, in which the technology is temporary protected from the full force of normal selection pressures, acts as a test bed and incubator for the new technology. It may pave the way for private and government support policies in a gradual, non-distortionary, and thus feasable way. The paper provides three examples of SNM in Europe: the large-scale experiment with light-weight electric vehicles in Mendrisio (CH), organised car sharing in Switzerland and Rolling Highway in Sweden.

In order to attain the goals of sustainable development, industrialised societies should aim to reduce their energy consumption and the environmental impact of their technologies, products and lifestyles by at least a factor of four, (Lovins et al., 1996). Such a dramatic efficiency revolution is not likely to occur by optimising existing technologies only gradually. Instead, radical innovations will have to gain acceptance both at the technological as well as at the behavioural level in the coming decades. This challenge applies not only to individual technologies but to a whole interrelated system of technologies, institutions and consumption patterns referred to as "technological regimes" (Kemp, 1997).
Evolutionary theories in economics and social sciences dealing with technical change have demonstrated that conventional policy instruments like environmentally motivated taxes and emission specific regulations often change existing technological regimes only marginally (Kemp, 1997; Wallace, 1995). In general, they are more successful at promoting incremental improvements of existing technologies, but less so in supporting and engendering radical innovations. Development and diffusion of radical innovations depends on the existence and adequate management of social contact networks that reduce uncertainties for the actors involved. Since these contact networks often have a regional dimension (Truffer and Dürrenberger, 1997), regional experiments represent a promising approach to supporting radical innovations. [...]

The "Ecoelectricity Project" headed by the EAWAG (Swiss Federal Institute for Environmental Science and Technology) aims to develop an ecolabel as an economic instrument for the promotion of ecologically sound hydropower generation. However, it is not always quite clear which methods of electricity generation can be considered unobjectionable in environmental terms. Hydropower operations, in particular, present a certain dilemma: On the one hand, hydropower is a renewable energy source without emissions and hence desirable from a global perspective. On the other hand, hydropower operations can be highly detrimental to the local and regional aquatic ecosystems. As a result, there is a need for an objective, scientifically based method for the ecological evaluation of hydropower operations. The EAWAG "Ecoelectricity Project" is developing such a method together with a process for the certification of "green hydropower".

Der Wettbewerb auf dem Elektrizitätsmarkt hat mittlerweile auch die Tarifkunden erfasst - „grüne" Stromtarife stellen für Anbieter und Kunden eine ökologische Alternative zum reinen Preiswettbewerb dar. Doch welche Produkte sind aus Umweltsicht wünschenswert und wie können Verbraucher sich in der Angebotsvielfalt zurechtfinden? Die Zertifizierung von Ökostrom („grünem Strom") ist ein wichtiges Instrument, um in diesem Marktsegment Transparenz zu schaffen und die Glaubwürdigkeit zu sichern. Eine Untersuchung der bestehenden Ökostrom-Labels macht unterschiedliche Strategien und Kriterien deutlich: Selbst auf nationaler Ebene ist „grün nicht gleich grün" und der Weg zu einheitlichen, gar europaweit tragfähigen Standards scheint lang.

Die Liberalisierung der Elektrizitätsmärkte führt zu einer zunehmenden Herausforderung für die einzelnen Erzeuger und Verteiler, ihre jeweiligen Produkte am Markt zu positionieren. Dazu müssen die Vorzüge ihrer Angebote den Kunden aktiv und glaubwürdig dargelegt werden. Im Bereich des entstehenden Marktes für Ökostrom stellt eine unabhängige Produktzertifizierung eine wichtige Unterstützung in diesem Bestreben dar. Der vorliegende Artikel analysiert die internationalen Trends bei Ökostromzertifizierungsverfahren im Hinblick auf eine europäische Perspektive des Labelings.

This paper comes to the conclusion that to conserve and restore natural biodiversity there is an urgent need to maintain and restore barrier-free streams, well structured and dynamic habitats as well as spawning and rearing habitats. This could be achieved through intensive co-operation among stream ecologists, river engineers and administrative authorities.

In recent years, a number of electric utilities in the USA and Europe have developed and offered green power products ("Ökostrom") to their customers. With the ongoing deregulation of electricity markets, these initiatives have received considerable interest as a policy instrument to promote an environmentally benign energy future. However, no precise criteria have been elaborated to decide in what respect these products are especially benign to the environment. The development of such criteria appears not very difficult in the case of most "new renewables", Iike solar energy and wind power. However, as soon as hydro power is taken into account, a much more elaborate evaluation has to be undertaken. From a global perspective, hydropower may be counted among the virtually emission-free, regenerative resources and should thus be preferred to more harmful resources in the generation of electricity. However, this assessment has to be balanced against the massive impacts on local ecosystems which are associated with the infrastructure and operation of hydroelectric power stations. A certification of hydropower has to take into account both global and local impacts in order to guarantee an ecologically sensible definition of what green power actually brings for the environment.
EAWAG has started a transdisciplinary research project "Ökostrom" in April 1998 which aims at establishing the scientific basis for the certification of hydroelectric power stations. Besides, the project aims at estimating market potentials for green power products on different economic and political assumptions. The overall project was developed in a team of natural and social scientists. From the beginning, a close interaction with representatives from electric utilities, non-governmental organizations and policy officials was endeavored. This interaction was decisive for the successful establishment of the project. The present article reconstructs and reflects the creation of the project. Currently the overall project encompasses about twenty research projects, both from within EAWAG and outside.

In der umweltpolitischen Debatte haben marktwirtschaftliche Instrumente in den letzten Jahren zunehmend an Aufmerksamkeit gewonnen. Grundsätzlich muß bei den marktwirtschaftlichen Instrumenten zwischen preisorientierten Ansätzen, wie CO₂-Steuern oder Energiesteuern (vgl. Kap. 11), und mengenorientierten Ansätzen, wie Zertifikatslösungen, unterschieden werden. In Europa standen vor allem erstere im Mittelpunkt der politischen Debatten, während letztere weitgehend vernachlässigt wurden. Ein wichtiger Grund scheint darin zu liegen, daß Zertifikatslösungen in der praktischen Umsetzung auf vielfältige Schwierigkeiten stoßen. Im vorliegenden Kapitel werden wir zeigen, daß Zertifikatslösungen in Zukunft eine steigende praktische Bedeutung zukommen dürfte. Mit Hilfe moderner Informationstechnologien können heute flexible, dezentrale und effiziente Zertifikatsmärkte für nahezu jede Art von Umweltbelastung systematisch implementiert werden. [...]

This article analyzes the relevance of a specific form of social networks, so-called innovative milieus, for the development of radical innovations. Two Swiss initiatives which developed highly energy-efficient means of individual transport in the past ten years are analyzed in terms of the resources they could mobilize and the risks they run. To assess the milieu's potential for radical innovation, we examine the construction of a lightweight safety system, the social construction of the product category "lightweight vehicle, " and the (mis)management of the interface between prototype development and large-scale manufacturing.