Environmental Policy And Technological Innovation

Surrendering to the notion that governments lack the political independence to set and enforce environmental standards, Corral (Institute for Strategy, Technology, and Policy at the TNO, Netherlands Organization for Applied Scientific Research) asks if it is possible to influence the technological and organizational innovative behavior of firms by means other than regulation. Addressing environmental and technology policy analysts, practitioners, and lobbyists, he presents a behavioral simulation model that he hopes can be used to harmonize long-term societal interests with short-term firm interests. The model attempts to link firms' ultimate behavior to their perceptions of environmental risk, economic risk, community pressure, market pressure, regulatory pressure, technological capabilities, and organizational capabilities. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

This book contains six studies on various national environmental policies and environment -oriented technology policy systems in Austria, Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, and the United Kingdom, sandwiched between this introductory and a concluding chapter. These studies were conducted as part of the ENVINNO research project, "Towards an Integration of Environmental and Ecology-Oriented Technology Policy: Stimulus and Response in Environment Related Innovation Networks", which formed part of the Targeted Social and Economic Research (TSER) Programme of Directorate-General XII of the European Commission, now 1 Directorate-General for Research. We like to thank Mrs. Genevieve Zdrojewski of GD Directorate-General Research for her kind support of our research project. The project was carried out between 1998 and 2001 by research teams from the six countries. The co-ordinating institute was the Department of Environmental Economics and Management at the Vienna University of 2 Economics and Business Administration. At this place we want to mention all researchers involved in the ENVINNO project and we want to thank them all for their contributions to this book and the project and for the good time we have had performing the project and meeting each other at regular intervals in Vienna (A), Enschede (NL), Berlin (D), and Sevilla (E). Department of Environmental Economics and Management at the Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration in Austria: • Univ. Prof. Dr. Uwe Schubert, • Mag. Judith Kock, • Mag. Jiirgen Mellitzer, 1 Under contract-number SOEI-CT98-110S. 2 The project website is http://www.wu-wien.ac.atiwwwu/institute/iuwIENVINNO.

This report presents three case studies to illustrate the relationship between environmental policy and technological innovation.

A workshop proceedings address questions that lead to a better understanding of the interaction between innovation and the environment and explored elements of "best practice" policies that can stimulate innovation for the environment and shift our development path towards sustainability.

This book, originally published in 1995, examines the evolution of environmental policy in 6 OECD countries. Through numerous examples, it contrasts the widely-varying political and regulatory styles and their consequences for innovation. Two industry-specific case studies provide a transnational perspective on the co-evolution of technology and environmental policy. The book concludes that innovation can be successfully harnessed by setting credible, long-term environmental goals and ensuring that regulatory instruments are grounded in flexibility, dialogue and trust.

This paper studies the effect of climate change mitigating policies on innovation in clean energy technologies. Results suggest that the tightening of environmental policies since the early 1990s have made a statistically and economically significant contribution to the increase in clean innovation. These effects generally materialized quickly, within 2 to 3 years of the policy change, and were driven by individually significant marginal effects of both market-based policies – such as feed-in tariffs and trading schemes – as well as non-market policies, such as R&D subsidies or emission limits. Looking at electricity innovation in particular, the paper finds that the estimated effect on total innovation is positive on net, meaning that increased innovation in clean and grey technologies is not offset by a decrease in innovation in dirty technologies. From a policy point of view, the paper’s results call for strong policy efforts to decisively shift innovation towards clean technologies.

This work assesses the impact of environmental policy on technical change in the development of clean technologies. It focuses in particular on the possibility of inducing radical change in technology policy, in contrast to the current regulatory practices which lead to the modification of existing products.