Reflections on the politics linking science, environment and innovation

Abstract

Green technological innovation is the subject of much current research because it is expected to serve ‘competitiveness’ and ‘ecological modernization’. Research needs to be extended to cover institutional innovation and the combined socio‐political impacts of the new environmentalism. One entry into this area is to examine the links between science, environmental protection, innovation, and the distribution of political power. It is argued that institutionalized science — or the research‐cum‐consultancy enterprise — thrives on the claim that it is able to solve fashionable’ problems, especially future ones, by technological progress. There is little historical reason to reject such claims. However, these claims make science, and especially the environmental sciences, of immediate interest to those seeking new powers or defending existing privileges or markets. Proposed solutions tend to be threats to vested interests and distributions of wealth and influence. But the power of science reaches beyond responding to the concerns of the day, it strives to select those problems for society which create markets for planned research agendas and technologies still on the computer screen. The research enterprise, at the root of much technological and technical innovation, is not likely to succeed in imposing its choices on society without support in the market place or from government. It therefore becomes an important, if neglected, political actor, influencing and persuading not only with appeals to rationality, but also with promises of enhanced security, health and wealth. Having identified and selected problems, these are presented to society with pleas for remedial or preventive action. This paper reflects on the impact of these pleas on contemporary world politics. It is concluded that political systems must learn to evaluate and judge scientific claims more cautiously because research networks and the informal influence of science entrepreneurs on ‘the public’ tend to turn environmental change into policy problems. Once technological fixes’ are offered simultaneously, potential implementor and enforcers form alliances demanding state intervention to resolve the alleged problems. How real is the global environmental problem — the allegedly evergrowing ökologische Problemdruck? Does the seeking of green competitiveness in the ‘North’ in the name of preventing catastrophe, whilst de facto opposing industrialization and resource developments in the ‘South’ in the name of ‘sustainable development’, represent the essence of global politics of the 1990s?

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