This TIPC Blog Series discusses how, by shining a Transformative Innovation Policy (TIP) perspective on the green new deals that are happening, not just in Europe, but around the world the outcomes could be transformed.
The editors of this blog series are Fred Steward, Emeritus Professor, School of Architecture and Cities, University of Westminster, London; and Jon Bloomfield, Systems Innovation Policy Advisor, Climate Innovation Ecosystems, the European Institute of Technology’s Climate Knowledge & Innovation Community (EIT Climate-KIC).
Introducing the Series
In the run-up to the next crucial international climate change conference -COP26 – to be held in Glasgow in November 2021, there are welcome signs that the big players across the world are responding to the challenge. Massive economic recovery programmes on both sides of the Atlantic include radically new policies to address climate change and promote sustainability. The European Green Deal and the US Green New Deal share an innovative environmental, economic and industrial policy mix. (Bloomfield and Steward 2020). This ‘Green Deal’ policy paradigm highlights the importance of transformation of the key sociotechnical systems of energy, mobility, buildings and food; with roots in system innovation thinking and low carbon transition policy. It seeks to remake transformative policy with inspiration more from Roosevelt’s challenge-led New Deal than Apollo’s technology-driven moonshot mission.
‘Green deal’ policy initiatives are underpinned by a belief in the value of active government, instead of neoliberal market dogma; the pursuit of public innovation for common purpose; and the coupling of job creation and social justice to climate actions. Its aspirations risk outstripping current ‘top down’ policy capabilities and they demand a new type of ‘bottom up’ transformative politics across the political spectrum. The green deal discourse signals a new policy landscape whose detailed shape is yet to be made but which offers a new promise to make transitions happen.
Our new ‘green deal’ blog is designed as a space to shape the Transformative Innovation Policy (TIP) and its practice to meet this challenge. Some will argue that the European and US programmes do not go far enough but we see them as a crucial development which opens up major opportunities for embedding systemic innovation and transition practice within the low carbon activities of cities, regions and countries internationally. They need to be linked with wider global concerns around the transformation of water, health and education systems. For all those committed to the transition to a low-carbon society, it is crucial that this opportunity does not slip through our fingers.
We have established this European Green Deal (EGD) blog to address six challenges:
To mark the TIP Conference 2022, the blog editors caught up with some of the blog authors to hear how policy can enact transformation for the Green New Deals.
