Department Environmental Social Sciences
SHIVAGO
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Technology-driven economic growth in its current form is based on the ever-increasing emission of greenhouse gases and toxic substances into the environment. However, there is now growing recognition that sustainable development efforts need to be accompanied by a shift in innovation towards green technologies and products. Under this emerging normative framing of innovation, the goals of innovation are shifting from being associated with technical sophistication, functionality and commercial viability to its potential to resonate with societal concerns such as environmental protection, public health, privacy and equity.
As this new set of value concerns has become a crucial driver of innovative activity, there is much to be understood about the mechanisms through which 1) innovation aims to address some specific problems rather than others and 2) through which institutional environments evolve, enabling the adoption and diffusion of green technologies and products.
In the SHIVAGO project, we analyze how valuation processes shape industry dynamics and sectoral transitions in view of grand societal challenges. Valuation is a social process by which technologies, products and services are both situated and assessed by actors within the context of prevailing value sets embodied in normative, regulatory and cognitive institutions. Valuation determines what technological foci are set by innovating actors, what product qualities are emphasised in the construction of markets and what qualities are valued by users and other societal actors. It often takes place through valuation devices such as energy efficiency rating systems for electrical appliances, which assess and convey the degree to which products and technologies are in line with specific sets of values.
Drawing on insights from innovation studies and economic sociology, we aim to better understand how value-driven innovation takes place and how new institutional structures that enable the assessment of new technologies are constructed. Empirically, we focus on two sectors that are currently confronted with an increasingly complex landscape of value concerns- the chemicals industry and the wastewater sector.
Chemical industry and chemistry-based product sectors
In the chemical industry and related chemistry-based sectors such as food packaging and outdoor clothing, emerging concerns about their negative impacts on human and environmental health are increasingly challenging their reliance on hazardous chemicals to deliver products valued for their functionalities. In most sectors, regulation still remains the main way through which these concerns are being linked to new and existing products. Yet, as regulation often comes into play only after products have already entered the market, ex post problem solving, end-of-pipe technologies or even regrettable substitutions hamper the effectiveness of these regulations. A recent example of a regrettable substitution can be found in food packaging, where consumers, NGOs and regulators increasingly push for the phase-out of Bisphenol A, an endocrine disrupting chemical found in plastic bottles and metal can coatings. This has led companies to substitute it with Bisphenol S and F, which are, however, linked to similar health concerns. Regulation is therefore being criticized for being too slow and ineffective in bringing about a significant shift towards products and technologies that pose a smaller burden on public health and the environment. A key interest of the project hence lies in the processes through which safe-and-sustainable chemistry principles are incorporated within food packaging and outdoor clothing beyond regulation. In particular, the project aims to investigate the mechanisms that allow value concerns to wield influence already within innovation processes and thereby shape technology development earlier and more effectively.
Urban and industrial wastewater sectors
Despite the abundance of sophisticated water treatment technologies, responsible wastewater management is far from being the norm in most regions of the world. However, confronted with climate-driven water stress and public pressure against polluters, cities and industries are mobilising efforts towards circular water systems. The challenge in breaking away from deeply ingrained principles and practices of linear water systems is multi-fold. Institutional barriers preventing the re-categorisation of treated wastewater as a drinking/non-potable water source are both regulatory as well as cultural. Quality standards for reuse applications and rating systems of service providers are examples of emerging valuation devices that allow wastewater to be assessed as a potential source of water. This project aims to identify mechanisms driving novel configurations of wastewater reuse and the building of new institutions and valuation processes that enable actors to ascribe new values to wastewater.
The chemical sector is complex, with pervasive linkages to numerous global economic sectors, making it particularly resistant to change in response to emerging value concerns. Chemical innovations lead to product development in numerous chemical-based industries. With there being thousands of chemicals and related products, resorting to regulatory action as an end-of-pipe solution is unlikely to lead to environmental protection and human safety. In such a complex sector, there is relevance in investigating how value concerns are taken up in the very process of product innovation. The wastewater sector, on the other hand, deals with more localised resources. Despite increasing standardisation of wastewater treatment technologies, valuation of wastewater as a resource is inevitably entangled with local cultural and socio-economic institutions. In this sector, we investigate the formation of new institutional structures that allow consumers to reassess the value of wastewater and adapt relevant resource recovery technologies to cater to their concerns and local resource limitations. By studying these fundamentally different sectors, SHIVAGO aims to theorise on how innovation processes interface with their institutional environment, thereby determining the direction of transitions.