Ouvrage auteur unique
| Résumé : | Current sustainability challenges are increasingly acknowledged to be of a systemic nature. Instead of procrastinating further through incremental changes, societal subsystems like mobility, energy, healthcare and agriculture are therefore considered to be in need of transitions and system innovations – encompassing systemic transformations involving changes in dominant cultures, structures and modus operandi. Thus far, great steps have been made in theorizing the complex societal dynamics through which dominant structures can transform. Yet in contrast to these synoptic insights, much less is known about the concrete interactions and negotiations that allow these large-scale processes to happen. How do system innovation processes unfold? And, considering that in diverse, polycentric societies ‘systemic problems’ are generally subject to contestation, what are the politics of system innovation?This study responds to the calls for deeper investigation into system innovation ‘in the making’. It does so by taking an immanent rather than transcendental approach, taking into account that situated actors typically lack such transcendental overview. In a polycentric society, initiatives towards transformation are always innovation attempts, selected upon by other and different actors. How can innovation attempts evolve into system innovations, and how can situated actors intervene in these processes? The key to the answer is to investigate how innovation attempts are not so much accepted or rejected, but especially how they are translated by recipient actors, how translation sequences form that sometimes intersect, and how actors cope with the ensuing complexity by synchronizing their translations.In-depth investigations after four innovation attempts in the Dutch traffic management field bring forward a miscellany of visions, ambitions and actions for systemic change in dealing with road traffic. Through the accounts of actors involved the tentative nature of system innovative action makes itself felt. Beyond the particularities of the separate innovation ‘journeys’, this study also identifies more generic translation patterns however – these dynamics offer a grammar through which to understand and navigate system innovation processes. The key notion of the intervention repertoire is synchronization – the temporary attunement of translations that provides anchors to the innovation game. |
