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Tipping Towards Sustainability: Emerging Pathways of Transformation Frances Westley1, Per Olsson2, Carl Folke2,3, Thomas Homer-Dixon4,5, Harrie Vredenburg6,7, Derk Loorbach8, John Thompson9,10, Måns Nilsson11, Eric Lambin12, Jan Sendzimir13, Banny Banarjee14, Victor Galaz2, Sander van der Leeuw15.

Working Paper no 3 Third Nobel Laureates Symposium on Global Sustainability

Transforming the World in an Era of Global Change, Stockholm May 16-19, 2011.

1. Waterloo Institute for Social Innovation and Resilience, University of Waterloo 2. Stockholm Resilience Centre, Stockholm University 3. Beijer Institute of Ecological Economics, Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences 4. Waterloo Institute for Complexity and Innovation, University of Waterloo 5. Centre for International Governance Innovation, Balsillie School of International Affairs 6. Haskayne School of Business, University of Calgary 7. Institute for Sustainable Energy, Environment & Economy, University of Calgary 8. Dutch Research Institute for Transitions (Drift), Erasmus University Rotterdam 9. Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex 10. ESRC STEPS Centre 11. Stockholm Environment Institute 12. Department of Geography, University of Louvain 13. The International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, Laxenburg, Austria 14. Institute of Design, Stanford University 15. Department of Anthropology, Arizona State University,

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About this Working Paper This Working Paper is one of three scientific background reports to the “3rd Nobel Laureate Symposium on Global Sustainability: Transforming the World in an Era of Global Change”, in Stockholm, 16-19 May 2011. The Symposium is held under the auspices of the Stockholm Resilience Centre, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, the Stockholm Environment Institute, the Beijer Institute of Ecological Economics and the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. It is the third in a series of symposia that gather Nobel Laureates, high-level representatives from politics, business and civil society, and renowned experts on sustainability and development to discuss the challenges of global sustainability. The three Working Papers addresses three themes: Reconnecting to the Biosphere: dealing with the role of ecosystems and the services they provide as the basis for societal development and human well-being. The Human Dominated Planet: focuses on the great acceleration of the human enterprise and on recent attempts to identify the safe operating space for humanity to continue to develop within a stable planet Earth. Tipping Towards Sustainability: explores the links between crisis, opportunity, and innovation for navigating shifts and large-scale transformations towards global sustainability. The three Working Papers provide the basis for discussions at the seminar and will, based on these discussions, be revised and submitted to the journal AMBIO. This Working Paper should be cited as: Westley, F., P. Olsson, C. Folke, T. Homer-Dixon, H. Vredenburg, D. Loorbach, J. Thompson, M. Nilsson, E. Lambin, J. Sendzimir, B. Banarjee, V Galaz, S van der Leeuw. 2011. Tipping towards sustainability: emergent pathways of transformation, Working Paper No. 3. Prepared for the “3rd Nobel Laureate Symposium on Global Sustainability: Transforming the World in an Era of Global Change”, in Stockholm, 16-19 May 2011. Stockholm Resilience Centre, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, the Stockholm Environment Institute, the Beijer Institute of Ecological Economics and the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research.

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Abstract This paper explores the links between agency, institutions, and innovation in navigating shifts and large-scale transformations towards global sustainability. Our central question is whether social and technical innovations can reverse the trends that are challenging critical thresholds and creating tipping points in the earth system, and if not, what conditions are necessary to escape the current lock-in. Large-scale transformations in information technology, nano- and biotechnology, and new energy systems have the potential to significantly improve our lives; but if, in framing them, our globalized society fails to consider the capacity of the biosphere, there is a risk that unsustainable development pathways may be reinforced. Current institutional arrangements, including the lack of incentives for the private sector to innovate for sustainability, and the lags inherent in the path dependent nature of innovation, contribute to lock-in, as does our incapacity to easily grasp the interactions implicit in complex problems, referred to here as the ingenuity gap. Nonetheless, promising social and technical innovations with potential to change unsustainable trajectories need to be nurtured and connected to broad institutional resources and responses. In parallel, institutional entrepreneurs can work to reduce the resilience of dominant institutional systems and position viable shadow alternatives and niche regimes.

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Key Messages 1. Innovation is a double-edged sword. Much of the economic and population growth

that has compromised ecosystem services has been driven by technological innovation. However, we propose that the human capacity for innovation can equally be used as a positive force for supporting transformations toward global sustainability; indeed that it is essential. The challenge is to use the planetary opportunity to direct innovation capacity into a sustainability pathway.

2. There is no deficiency of social and technological innovations in the world. In fact,

the tremendous expansion of humanity and the Great Acceleration into the Anthropocene is a reflection of an amazing innovation capacity, supported by easily accessible and abundant energy sources, predominantly fossil fuels. However much of this innovation has occurred without reference to ecological integrity, or complex system interactions. It is also innovation that has been insufficiently tuned to the challenges of poverty alleviation, human rights, social justice and human wellbeing.

3. A key challenge now is to use this innovative capacity to unlock the current lock-ins

of unsustainable trajectories and support transformations toward global sustainability. The lock-ins originates, in part, from the cognitive limits of human ingenuity in the face of complex dynamics, and the associated failure to anticipate unexpected consequences of innovation. Lock-ins and lags are also due to the path dependent nature of technology, the incentives and regulations that govern private sector innovations and the self-referent nature of the institutions governing society, the environment and technology.

4. Major ongoing attempts to transform include transitions toward new energy sources

and integrated approaches to management and governance of ecosystems services. These processes are supported by numerous initiatives around the world, including transition towns, clean energy, particularly for the developing world, conservation economies, biosphere reserves, eco-agriculture, and ecosystem-based fisheries management. Such radical or disruptive innovations however often stay localized. To support 9 billion people without transgressing critical planetary boundaries, efforts to diffuse and scale the most promising innovations must be accelerated. This requires the transformation of the institutions that shape our cultural, political and economic transactions – in short, shift our governance processes from those that do not privilege sustainable innovation to those that do.

5. Incentives and enabling conditions are needed to stimulate the emergence of technical

and social innovations that help reconnect to the biosphere and respect interacting planetary boundaries. Innovation challenges, new investment funds, seed money, and other incentives developed by state and non-state actors at local, national and regional levels are helpful. So too are attention to framing alternatives, and creating policy and legal conditions that promote such innovation. This includes stimulating viable, alternative pathways, or “shadow tracks”, and harnessing the creativity inherent in innovation niches to these broader sustainability goals. Supporting institutional entrepreneurs who can identify and promote transformative innovations and connecting them to the necessary capital – social, financial and cultural will help to

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ensure institutional impact, durability and scale. Transformation will be as much a matter of social as technical innovation.

6. A more connected global society has the means to quickly respond to change and

stimulate innovations on a planetary scale. Expert-driven, centralized and top-down approaches to problem solving are not nimble enough to effectively address global challenges characterized by high levels of complexity and uncertainty. Nor are traditional, disciplinary based research approaches. New forms of knowledge integration and generation that support planetary stewardship are required, capable of integrating a much richer diversity of ideas and viewpoints and of bringing action and research into closer proximity.

7. Social media and associated advances in information and communication

technologies can play a significant role in providing platforms for the stimulation and integration of the ideas as well as mobilizing collective action at key moments of opportunity. Investment in “policy laboratories” or “Change Labs” can create the conditions for successful integration of different perspectives and knowledge sets, facilitating breakthroughs in complex problem domains through the use of sophisticated process design, and ‘beta testing’ alternative, more sustainable policy and management options that can be ready when, for example, a crisis opens up a window of opportunity for transformative change. Financial and political support is required to create such spaces for safe-fail experiments in communities worldwide.

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1. Introduction Humanity has entered the Anthropocene era; human activity has become a major driving force in the history of the planet. The future of human wellbeing may be seriously compromised if we should pass a critical threshold that tips the earth system out of this stability domain (Rockström et al. 2009). It is plausible that current development paradigms and patterns, if continued, would tip the integrated human-earth system into a radically different basin of attraction (Steffen et al. 2007). Preventing such an undesired critical transition will require innovation and novelty. Profound change in society is likely to be required for persistence in the Holocene stability domain (Folke et al. 2011; Steffen et al. 2011). Such change requires recognition of interlinked social and ecological systems, as well as planetary stewardship that can help steer humankind away from potential thresholds and tipping-points in the earth system. Achieving planetary opportunities to remain within a safe operating space will require major transformations towards pathways of development that reconnect us in a collaborative relationship with the biosphere (Folke et al. 2011). Scientists concerned about the future of the planet have pointed to the urgent need for sustainability transitions (Clark 2001; Kates et al. 2001; Raskin et al. 2002). They recognize that these may require radical, systemic shifts in deeply held values and beliefs, patterns of social behavior, and multi-level governance and management regimes. The first Nobel laureate symposium deliberated about “The Great Transformation,” and made a passionate case in the resulting Potsdam Memorandum for fundamental changes in our economies and societies in order to achieve sustainability. In the proceedings from the meeting, Gell-Mann (2010) identified a set of interlinked transitions – demographic, technological, economic, social, institutional, informational and ideological – that must occur if the world is to switch from present trends to greater sustainability. Despite these pleas for major change, there is still a lack of understanding of the mechanisms and patterns involved, and of the conditions under which such transformations can emerge. This lack of understanding greatly decreases the chances for successfully navigating transformation and embarking upon sustainable trajectories. As described by Steffen et al. (2011), humankind’s problems are rendered more difficult by the rebound effects on societies of human perturbations of key processes in the earth system such as global nitrogen, sulfur, and carbon cycles; the declining availability of resources critical to human well being like fresh water, rich cropland, and high-quality energy; the rising complexity, interconnectivity, and speed of operation of key global social-ecological systems, including the world’s financial, trade, food, and resource-extraction systems; and, as a result of the foregoing three trends, the rising frequency of threshold behavior in these key systems. The growing concern about these issues among researchers and decision makers has lead to an increased focus on the role of innovations to solve these problems, while recognizing that the last three decades of high innovation capacity have contributed to the creation of these same problems. In this paper we ask this question: can we innovate sufficiently rapidly and with sufficient intelligence to transform our system out of a destructive pathway and into one that leads to long-term social and ecological resilience? We define resilience as” the capacity of a system to absorb disturbance and reorganize while undergoing change so as to still retain

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essentially the same function, structure, identity, and feedbacks” (Walker et al. 2004; Folke et al. 2011) and transformability as the capacity to create untried beginnings from which to evolve a fundamentally new way of living when existing ecological, economic, and social conditions make the current system untenable (Walker et al. 2004; Chapin et al. 2010; Folke et al. 2010; Olsson et al. 2010; Folke et al. 2011). We argue that a complex system perspective that links social-ecological-technological is needed to understand the paradox of innovation. Why we continue to move in unsustainable trajectories despite a growing recognition of the planetary perils involved? What are the interacting lock-in mechanisms operating at different levels and scales and in different parts of the system (social, economic, ecological) which make transformation difficult? How can we “unlock” these mechanisms to allow for the rapid and appropriate innovation we need? And, most centrally, can we use our capacity to innovate to change the probable course of the future, responding creatively to crises as opportunity? 2. The innovation paradox: a double-edged sword

Historically, humanity has put great faith in technological innovation to help transform societies and improve the quality of life (examples include the industrial revolution, the more recent Green Revolution and the Internet Revolution). Starting with the liberalized market ideals advanced globally during the Thatcher and Reagan era in the 1980s, the belief that the free market would deliver innovation and improve the quality of life for everyone quickly became a dominant policy paradigm across most of the Western world. The European Union and its member states put in place policies and legal frameworks requiring the deregulation of infrastructures such as telecom, railways, and energy. The experiment proved disappointing. Simple deregulation did sometimes result in accelerated innovation in, for instance, communication, transportation and alternative energy, but primarily led to an optimization of existing systems rather than to system innovations towards sustainability. Nonetheless, we have not entirely lost our confidence in the technological “fix,” nor should we (Allenby1993). Questioning innovation goes against the grain of our current worldview and the societal and governance structures that rule our lives. Invention (the creation and implementation of new ideas) and innovation (the spread of the latter in society) have in our system served as the principal means of economic value creation, rather than as a means to reduce our impact on the biosphere, our life-supporting environment. Globalization shows how the creation and spread of material wealth all across the world is closely tied to the maintenance of the social peace enjoyed by western countries. Indeed, since the Industrial Revolution, western society has become dependent on material innovation and the attendant value creation to maintain its political and social systems. There are good reasons why we place faith in our capacity to innovate; it has been associated with a better quality of life for all. Therefore, while many environmentalists may distrust technology, there is no doubt that achieving sustainability will require better technologies (Allenby 1993; Graedel and Allenby 1995). Today, attention has again turned to the need for more targeted public efforts to induce socio-technical innovation and transformation. This goes beyond publicly funded R&D support to include measures such as publicly funded demonstration projects in carbon capture and sequestration, or support for niche –markets developing

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renewable energy sources. Scientists, decision-makers, and concerned citizens repeatedly turn to industries such as biotechnology and nanotechnology, in the belief that innovation in those domains may offer the solution to everything from food scarcity to global pandemics and climate change. The fact that, in free market societies, much of the capacity for technological innovation resides in commercial enterprises points to the private sector as a key actor in the creation of new pathways to sustainability (Allenby and Richards 1994). However, there are warning signs that suggest that technological innovation, far from serving our needs, may indeed be driving development in directions directly opposed to sustainability (van der Leeuw, 2010). We may be “locked in” to a technological innovation trajectory reinforcing the current path. Our societies have become dependent on innovation for their survival. Continued innovation is needed to keep creating new value, so that the economic system can expand, and nations can claim increases in GDP and wealth. Any slowing down, or shrinking, of the economy has become stigmatized as “backsliding,” liable to lead to a crisis, although recently economists are debating a more neutral attitude towards growth as a way to arrive at a more balanced valuation of economic change which includes environmental and social quality (Van den Bergh 2010). The still dominant focus on economic growth is closely related to the unbridled demographic growth of the last century, and to societal structures which we fear might prove inadequate, or even fall apart, if we could no longer demonstrate ‘progress’ (Lane et al. 2009). This, in turn, has encouraged and produced an almost unchecked acceleration in the pace of innovation, accompanied by the emergence of unintended consequence. In essence, we have less and less control over the impacts of our innovations. Whatever form a transition to sustainability might take, it will imply weaning ourselves from this addiction to innovation for its own sake, or at the very least finding the institutional frameworks to stimulate the kinds of innovation that solve rather than augment our environmental challenges (Steffen et al. 2011). This may mean finding better ways to integrate the institutions that govern societal issues, those that govern technology, and those that seek to safeguard the dynamic physical boundaries and capacities of the earth system. It implies reconnecting development to the biosphere (Folke et al. 2011). There are a number of concerns in this regard. First, the problems we are facing are so complex that it is hard for us to grasp their dimensions – there is an “ingenuity gap” between the demand for appropriate solutions and its supply. Secondly, the nature of technological innovation processes is in some ways inimical to the nature of a healthy environment; and further, the path dependent (vs. path breaking) character of technological innovation means there may be a lag between what we see as an emerging crisis and the available technological response. Lastly, the sector most likely to produce innovative technical responses to environmental threats, the private sector, is constituted as the engine of economic growth and is unlikely to place that innovative capacity at the service of greater sustainability unless broad institutional shifts occur to encourage such reorientation. We will deal with each of these arguments in turn.

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2.1 The ingenuity gap There are many limits to human ingenuity. In particular, the sheer complexity of linked social ecological systems makes it difficult to respond adequately. Surprise is common and by definition unanticipated. Our interventions in the broader life-supporting environment are based on a limited knowledge of that environment, and our impact on that environment has many dimensions that are unknown to us. The disproportion between the known dimensions on which we base our actions and the unknown dimensions that are affected by these actions is directly related to the relationship between the (relatively small) number of dimensions that we recognize, and the (almost infinite) number that we do not. Hence, the increase in our knowledge about our role in the environment cannot keep pace with the increase of the unknown impact of our actions on that environment. If the former might at most be geometric, the latter is more likely exponential and is reflected in the great acceleration of human activities and its imprints on the biosphere (Steffen et al. 2011). Box 1.

Managing a global transition from deforestation to reforestation A central challenge for sustainability is how to preserve forest ecosystems and

their services while enhancing food production. During recent decades, most new agricultural land across the tropics came into production at the expense of intact or disturbed forests, raising concerns about environmental services and biotic diversity globally. At a global scale, land is becoming a scarce resource, which argues for more efficient land use allocation and innovation in agriculture. Different uses are competing for the available land: cropland to feed a growing world population and produce the feedstocks for the current generation of biofuels, pastures, urban expansion, industrial forestry, protected areas. Climate change and land degradation also influence future land uses.

The prognosis may appear to be dire, but evidence from a few countries demonstrates that appropriate policies can lead to national-scale land use transitions that spare land for forests. Several developing countries have recently achieved a national scale shift from net deforestation to net reforestation, with a simultaneous increase in food production: China, Vietnam, India, Bhutan, Costa Rica, El Salvador, and Chile. Understanding the conditions associated with these land use transitions is rich in policy lessons. Most of these countries experienced a growing total population, with a decreasing or stable rural population. Crop yields increased, and the total agricultural area generally expanded. Protected areas have also expanded. Forest plantations contributed a large share of the expanding forest cover in Chile, Vietnam and China. The roundwood production in these countries declined or remained stable. All these countries displaced some of their land use abroad as they were going through a land use transition: additional global land use change in neighboring countries ,embodied in their wood imports, did offset more than half of their total reforested area. This unintended consequence of forest protection in one country context decreased the global environmental benefits of national land use policies. The land use transition in these countries has thus been achieved through multiple mechanisms including agricultural intensification, land use zoning, forest protection, increasing reliance on imported food and wood products, and foreign

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capital investments. The pathways leading to a land use transition rely to various degrees and combinations on off-farm employment, land use diversification by smallholders, state intervention in land management, and integration in the global economic system. However, numerous developing countries with conditions similar to that of the seven recent forest transition countries have not achieved a net reforestation, suggesting that forest transitions are contingent.

Managing a transition toward more environmentally efficient and thus more sustainable land use involves better information on the global impacts of land use decisions, the creation of appropriate incentives for agents, and a greater capacity to adopt new land use practices. Market responses to the prospect of a future scarcity of land are likely to stimulate the adoption of more efficient land management practices. Innovations that could prevent a global land shortage include technological breakthroughs on genetically-modified crops or second generation biofuels, investments for restoration of degraded lands, adoption of more vegetarian diets in rich countries, strict land use planning to preserve prime agricultural land, new industrial processes to produce synthetic food, feed and fibers, and the rise of eco-consumerism among wealthy consumers. Given that virtual exchanges of natural resources embodied in commodities being traded internationally increasingly redistributes environmental impacts of policies and economic activities at the global scale, achieving a global-scale forest transition may require a tighter relationshipbetween trade and environmental policies – for example, through some involvement of the World Trade Organization.

Source: Lambin E.F. and P. Meyfroidt. 2011. Global land use change, economic globalization, and the looming land scarcity. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 108(9): 3465-3472. Humankind’s innovation challenge can be understood in terms of an “ingenuity gap” between the increasing seriousness of the world’s problems and the lagging supply of solutions to those problems. Homer-Dixon (1995; 2000) defines “ingenuity” as sets of instructions that people use to arrange the things in their world (including materials and other people) to solve their problems. As our world’s problems become harder, our requirement for ingenuity – measured by the length and complexity of the sets of instructions we need to address our problems – rises. Too often now, it seems, we cannot supply this required ingenuity. Ingenuity’s sets of instructions are, essentially, algorithms for problem solving. Unlike what we commonly call innovation, ingenuity does not have to be novel; the problem-solving algorithms in question may have been available in society for a long time but not used or implemented. Only when they are implemented (and regardless of whether or not they actually solve the problem they address) is the ingenuity they represent supplied. Ingenuity comes in two general forms: technical and social. Technical ingenuity tells us how to configure matter into physical technologies to solve problems, while social ingenuity tells us how to configure people into organizations and institutions to solve problems (Homer-Dixon and Barbier 1999). In addition to the cognitive limitations described above, other supply side factors hinder humankind’s ability to deliver the ingenuity it needs when and where it is needed. These

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include the institutional pressures and incentives (governance regimes, market incentives, cultural values) that attract and shape the emergence of both technical and social innovation. If we are to tip our pathway from an unsustainable course to a sustainable one, we need to create the best possible institutional arrangements to stimulate the kinds of innovation we need to move towards global sustainability. 2.2 The antagonism between the organization of technology and the organization of the biosphere As argued by Folke et al. (2011) the conceptual and institutional separation of social and ecological systems has contributed and continues to contribute to a misfit between ecosystems and governance systems. This is one of the reasons humans have pushed the earth system along unsustainable trajectories, and put it and the future of human wellbeing under serious pressure (Steffen et al.2011). This separation is a strong contributor to the path dependence that makes is so hard to shift to sustainable trajectories. Innovations that may seem initially path breaking may instead reinforce the current unsustainable pathway, digging that hole deeper and deeper. In the same line of reasoning, Commoner (1993) points out that the “technosphere,” the innovative engine that has driven the modern economy, is organized along lines very different from and even contrary to the functioning of the “biosphere.” Commoner summarizes four points of contrast: 1) the cyclical nature of ecological processes vs. the linear, means-end reasoning that characterizes the technosphere; 2) the biosphere represents a dynamic equilibrium in the exchange of matter and energy, destruction and creation vs. the technosphere’s orientation towards profit maximization through the externalization of environmental and social costs; 3)in the biosphere, parts are fundamentally interdependent vs. the technosphere, where single variable interventions without reference to system impacts and interactions are the rule rather than the exception; 4) elements of the biosphere by nature evolve in relation to each other to achieve system integrity vs. the idea that growth of separate parts, irrespective of the system, is a good and limitless possibility (Commoner 1993, 8-13).

For these reasons, among others, technological and economic solutions to global environmental challenges are often inimical to the health of the biosphere. There are numerous examples of how sustainability innovations tend to involve few sectors and focus on single environmental problems (Walker et al. 2009a). For example, The Baltic Sea Action Group (http://en.bsag.fi) has a regional focus on sustainability and a specific focus on solving the problem of the very polluted and eutrophicated Baltic Sea. Their New Challenges program aims to identify high-risk, high gain solutions to the challenges of an ecosystem that has gone through a number of undesired regime shifts (see for example Österblom 2008). One such innovation is oxygenation of the sea bottom to counteract the anoxic conditions that spreading due to eutrophication. But the question is will this single solution to a single problem unlock the positive feedback loops that keep the Baltic in its current degraded state? Instead, a more integrated approach to the restoration of large-scale social-ecological systems might be more appropriate. For example, the oxygenation could be coordinated and combined with solutions like the adaptive management of fisheries. Additionally these efforts might be synchronized with

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a good saltwater inflow year (which comes from the North Sea and happens irregularly), thereby use the opportunity to temporarily lower the threshold and enable a shift or transition to a more desirable state (Österblom et al. 2010a). Another example is climate change; a problem receiving huge attention at the moment. The current focus for dealing with this problem is on innovations and economic reforms that can assist in developing new energy sources, that can in turn slow climate change and/or reduce its impact (like carbon pricing and renewable energy technology). Proposed solutions range from small-scale innovations to ones involving large-scale geo-engineering (Blackstock et al. 2009; McCracken 2009; Morrow et al. 2009). However, the linked nature of environmental challenges (Lenton et al. 2008; Rockström et al. 2009; Walker et al. 2009a) calls for global integrated approaches that can focus on innovative ways of addressing the interface between sectors and problem domains, approaches such as new multi-level governance solutions for addressing the interface between climate change, biodiversity, and ocean acidification (Galaz et al. in review a). Societies may undergo major transformations in important parts or sectors without improving their capacity to learn from, respond to, and manage environmental feedback from dynamic ecosystems (Olsson and Galaz in press). For example, a systemic shift to biofuels might slow climate change but lead to destructive land-use change and biodiversity loss (Grau and Aide 2008). This in turn can lead to further ecological degradation, regime shifts, and lock-in traps in social-ecological systems that are difficult to escape. Resilience thinking adds the social-ecological system perspective to our understanding of such shifts (Berkes and Folke 1998; Folke et al. 2010; Scheffer and Westley 2007). The challenge is to align innovation, largely driven by the private sector, to society’s mounting concerns with planetary boundaries and ecosystem services. The current organization of technological innovation is, however, driven by endogenous variables and shaped by path dependency; it is difficult to harness it efficiently to the environmental challenges we are facing. 2.3 The lag created by supply driven innovation, the path dependent nature of technology, and the institutional context of innovation For much of human history, invention (the creation and implementation of new ideas) and innovation (the spread of the latter in society) were relatively de-coupled events. While invention was ongoing in many locations, inventions were only taken up in society when there was a felt need for them. A millennium elapsed, for example, between the discovery of ironworking in Europe and its wholesale adoption. During that time, an old social order (based on control of copper mines) came to an end, so that a new social order (based on using omnipresent iron) could emerge. In essence, innovation was demand-driven. In Europe, this began to change in the 17th century. Girard (1990) describes how, over the last three centuries (the period of the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution), a western attitude that valued continuity and explained the present with reference to “history” was transformed into one in which “innovation” is prized and the new (and unknown) is preferred over the older (and known). During this time, we see a number of

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profound changes in the process of invention and innovation which correspond to major changes in our societies (Lane et al. 2009 ).Two are of particular interest here. First, innovation gradually became supply-driven rather than demand-driven. Today, interesting new ideas or tools spawn companies that invest in marketing that tool so that people will buy and use it; rather than wait for a felt need, that “need” is created. Secondly, the new ideas or tools are in themselves driven by the availability of pre-existing technology platforms. As Arthur (2009) has pointed out, new technologies do not spring from the air; they are combinations of technological elements or sets, which are in turn combinations of previous elements or sets. Hence, when radical new social or ecological problems arise, whether in the form of pandemics or of climate change, our capacity to innovate in response is hampered by a history of technological path dependency and a culture of supply-driven innovation. This comes close to technological lock-in, reinforced through several forms of positive feedback (Kaiser 2003; Walker et al. 2009b), including social, legal, and economic variables. Particularly important for innovation are those feedbacks that guide the behavior of the private sector firms. Jacobs (1992) argues that government and commerce constitute two distinct human social systems with their own properties and dynamics. Governments set the rules of engagement while businesses innovate and deliver goods and services in the most effective and efficient manner. When the natural function of one of these systems is assigned to the other, the outcome is rarely ideal. Since the 1980s, however, there has been a call for business to pick up what governments are largely no longer doing. Business, goes the argument, should address society’s environmental concerns; and social concerns. In doing so business can unleash a cascade of innovation and productivity gains (Porter and Kramer 2011). However, business has evolved, especially since the 1950s, in a way that limits its possible contribution to wider societal challenges. Whereas previously the role of business was to provide a stable flow of services, goods and employment, the post-war demographic and economic growth has put economic success and shareholder value at the heart of business entrepreneurship. This in turn has evoked business behavior focusing on optimizing shareholder value and externalizing cost. A business community that is itself locked in an unsustainable growth-oriented regime can only play a constructive role in accelerating the desired transitions when this one-dimensional focus is no longer confers competitive advantage. Although there are signs that in some sectors this is increasingly the case (resource intensive industries, food, construction, energy), it will require clever strategies on the part of governments and civil society organizations to create conditions under which businesses that create broader social value are favored over businesses which only focus on their own economic value creation (Loorbach et al 2010). Given this reality, the question becomes: under what circumstances can we expect business to “do the right thing” and use its capacity for innovation to address the serious environmental and social issues afflicting the planet? Studies of firms that take innovative pathways to sustainability suggest that they do so only if it simultaneously increases their competitive advantage (Sharma and Vredenburg 1998). In attempting to respond to calls for sustainability innovation, firms face a storm of contradictory demands (Hall and Vredenburg 2003). However, contextual or

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institutional changes can make innovation for sustainability more attractive. This can happen in two ways: a) NGO and public pressure can increase the costs of not innovating; b) government can change the rules through negative and positive sanctions so that investment in such innovation potentially pays off in new business or investment for the company. NGO pressure on large stockholder-owned western companies can affect the strategy of those companies. Canadian oil company Talisman Energy, despite their genuine and skillful efforts to meet international NGO demands, saw their share prices drop as international NGOs campaigned against their operation on the grounds of its impact on ethnic/religious minorities in southern Sudan. Eventually the company was driven out of Sudan. International resource companies increasingly operate on a global stage where their mistakes can be amplified to the point of driving them out of the marketplace (Petersen and Vredenburg 2009). But what is the effect of this on innovation for sustainability? While, in principle, such institutional pressure seems a good thing, and can clearly cause corporations to stop a given negative course of action, it is not clear that this ultimately opens a more sustainable pathway, nor that it is a stimulus to innovation. When Western resource companies bow to such NGO pressure, as did Talisman, they are less likely to invest further in social or technical innovation and more likely to get out. They are then often replaced by national oil companies from an emerging economy country; companies that might be less sensitive to NGO pressure (Allwright and Vredenburg 2010). Nonetheless, without such NGO pressure it is often difficult for firms to justify the cost of innovation. Events such as the Exon-Valdez oil spill and Shell Nigeria’s involvement in civil strife have not so much changed international regulation of the oil industry as drawn public indignation resulting in much greater engagement of international oil companies in community projects and collaborations. This in turn has driven innovation (Moser, 2001) as such engagement with stakeholders, while difficult and ambiguous, often adds value, providing firms with new viewpoints, new knowledge and new networks. Strategies of intense stakeholder engagement, often characterize firms that are innovating for sustainability. As firms develop skills in the process of engagement and co-creativity, they gain a competitive advantage that is hard to replicate (Hall and Vredenburg 2003; Higginson and Vredenburg 2010; Vredenburg and Westley 2002). Ultimately, however, in order for business and the market to play a truly innovative role in major sustainable development systemic change, beyond paying it lip service, a market must be created for the services or products concerned. This is a complex social and institutional process that needs the collaboration of business, government, and other civil society actors. Part of that process is the creation and enforcement of standards, so that a “level playing field” is created that in turn makes investment in innovation worthwhile for the firm. Enforcement can be effected through either penalizing non-compliant firms or through favoring, through quicker regulatory approvals, innovative and proactive firms. Regulation, if enforced by the state or by appropriate targeted NGO pressure, is a proven stimulus to innovation. (Porter 1998; Strebel 2004).

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3. Tipping towards sustainability: understanding and supporting innovation as a means to transformation North (1990) argues that societal change comes about as a consequence of the interaction between organizations and institutions. Institutions are the formal rules and informal social norms that society places upon organizations. Cultural institutions, economic institutions and governance institutions all play a role in preventing or enabling transformation. They embody the macro level rule sets that frame the behavior of organizations, from governments to private firms as well as that of civil society (Giddens; 1976). As we have noted above, the current rules governing the private sector and the economy are not likely to support innovation for sustainability. Similarly our culture of consumption and growth stimulates behavior antithetical to tipping our systems in the direction of sustainability. We need to move beyond scientific understanding to create the shifts we wish to see, and turn the problem of the great acceleration addressed in Folke et al. (2011) and Steffen et al. (2011) into planetary opportunities for change. Table 1: Gidden's theory of structuration

Here we turn to the potential for innovation to stimulate broad system transformation, but from a slightly different perspective. As Arthur (2009) has pointed out, a large proportion of innovations are new combinations of old properties. It is the relationship between the properties that defines the novelty. In radical (or “disruptive”) innovation, these relationships are different enough to those structured by the established institutions, whether cultural, social or political, that they may provoke a disruption of those institutions. Only a change in rules can in fact allow for the reconfiguration of resources and behavior required to transform our current pathways. Change demands innovation

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across multiple scales. It demands innovation in our global and national institutions, from a pattern that supports environmental destruction to one that favors long-term resilience and sustainability. We need to work simultaneously at the macro institutional scale, the meso organizational/network, and the micro scale of individuals and small groups, where invention originates and where the early source of support for “disruptive” or “catalytic” innovation may be found (Christensen et al. 2006). Finally we most foster mechanisms and agency that can connect a healthy supply of invention, with the institutional opportunities that emerge. In the next section we explore four principles for building our capacity to innovate in the interest of such transformation. 3.1. Think and work at multiple scales – recognize the interplay of top down and bottom-up dynamics Innovation studies from the domain of business, technology and organizational behavior, have long established the importance of approaching innovation from a top-down/bottom up perspective. In large, continuously innovating firms, the strategic apex sets strategic direction, but innovation occurs at the front lines, on the shop floor, or in small designated teams. Top management does not so much “control or direct” the innovation process, as provide resources and opportunities for exploration and experimentation (Nonaka and Nishiguchi,2001; Westley, 1990). There is a key role here for intermediaries, or knowledge brokers, at the middle management level, who are able to question the strategic context in order to understand why and where a firm wishes to move, frame that for those working on the front lines, identify promising innovations, and sell these to the strategic apex (Nonaka and Takeuchi 1995; Burgelman 1983). This is sometimes called management up-down or “sandwiched” innovation (Lane et al. 2009). When innovative ideas are connected to strategic priorities this produces the cascade of resources required to bring innovation to markets and scale it up.

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Figure 1: Managing up-down for social innovation. In the greater complexity of social and technological innovation designed to address broad system concerns such as sustainability, there are similarities and differences with the corporate innovation model. The emerging work on successful social innovation, focuses on the dynamics of scaling up new ways of thinking, new processes for action and decision making, new designs for behavior and new social programs (inventions) for greater durability and impact. This work recognizes significant differences between the dynamics of technological innovation within firms and those of social innovation, including the greater complexity that decouples such innovations from markets and the role of governments as intervening actors (Westley and Antadze 2010; Moore and Westley 2011; Hillman et al. 2011). However, many similarities can be found in the two processes (Mulgan et al. 2007). Central to both is the role of individuals with particular skills, and the need to focus on cross scale interactions in order to gauge which innovations have high impact, durability and scale (Figure 1). The transition approach (also called the socio-technical transitions approach) originating in the Netherlands, has developed a number of models for analyzing the role of cross-scale dynamics in broad, system transformations within society (or important subsystems). Drawing on such examples as the demographic transition, the transition from an industrial to a service economy, from extensive to intensive agriculture, and from horse-and-carriage to individual car-mobility (Rotmans et al. 2001; Geels 2002), transition researchers explore the shift from a relatively stable system (dynamic equilibrium) though a period of relatively rapid change during which the system reorganizes irreversibly into a new (stable) system.

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Both the social innovation perspective and the transition perspective assume that innovation and invention tend to occur in niches, at micro scales, local levels, or in the front lines where problems are encountered and solved. Both also recognize that the challenges of linking innovation to system transformation are many, but so are the possibilities. In transition research a multi-level and multi-phase concept is used to analyze patterns and dynamics in the innovation and breakdown that drive transitions (Rip and Kemp 1998; Geels 2002; Geels and Schot 2007; Markard and Truffer 2008). Three inter-related levels are identified: regimes, landscape, and niches (Figure 2). Regimes are the dominant rule-sets supported by incumbent social networks and organizations and embedded in dominant artifacts and prevailing infrastructures, of say, particular industries or social problem arenas. Landscape provides the environment in which regimes evolve. It consists of features like the geographical position of the land, climate and available resources, and “softer” features like political constellations, economic cycles, and broad societal trends. Landscape factors are a major source of selection pressure on dominant regimes, and so, as landscapes shift, so do the possibilities for innovation and scaling-up of innovations. Radical innovation originates in niches: small protected spaces in which new practice can develop, protected from harsh selection criteria and resistance from prevailing regimes. Transitions (changes from one stable regime to another) are conceptualized in the model as occurring when landscape pressures destabilize prevailing regimes, providing breakthrough opportunities for promising niches. This implies a non-linear process of change in which, after passing critical thresholds, elements of a previously dominant regime recombine with successful niches into a new dynamically stable configuration (Rotmans and Loorbach 2009).

Figure 2: Multi-level perspective of transitions (adapted from Geels, 2002).

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The Resilience Alliance, a group working on understanding the dynamics of linked social -ecological systems and the properties of resilience, provides a framework (www.resiliencealliance.com) of cross-scale and nested systems that complements both the transition and the social innovation models (Gunderson and Holling 2002) but extends it to explicitly provide a model that integrates both the social and the ecological (see figure 3). This framework emphasizes the dynamic interplay between rapid and gradual change, and the notion of thresholds or tipping points, which can occur when resilience of a social-ecological system state is sufficiently reduced to allow a shift to another state. It suggests the possibility that under the right conditions change can occur rapidly, a viewpoint that lends hope to those concerned with lags and lock-ins. Such changes are often triggered by a perturbation, like a forest fire or an national election.

Figure 3: Cross scale linkages (Panarchy) – a resilience framework (based on Gunderson and Holling, 2002). They can also be triggered, however, by a “disruptive “ or “catalytic” innovation, one that addresses the needs of those not served by the dominant institutional and organizational systems, including the governance system (Hwang and Christensen 2007). A good example is that of the growing success of ecosystem based management. While in some governance regimes, notably the United States marine zoning and shifts to ecosystem-based management have been severely constrained by inflexible institutions, lack of public support, and difficulties developing acceptable legislation (Crowder et al. 2006), in many others new integrated management systems, like adaptive co-management and ecosystem-based management, are emerging and institutionalized around the world (Olsson et al. 2004a; 2008; Garaway and Arthur 2004; Gunderson and Light 2006; Lemos and Agrawal 2006; Miclat et al. 2006; Armitage et al. 2007; Berkes 2009; Cundill and Fabricius 2010; Gunningham 2009). Disruptive innovation has a fundamentally different relationship to system transformation than the innovation process identified in the corporate innovation literature and described

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above. The latter results in a continuous supply of novelty that may build resilience of the firm, and even the industry, but does not fundamentally disrupt it. In social innovation, this is the equivalent of ideas that take advantage of opportunities at the regime level but do not fundamentally challenge the broader landscape or institutional level that defines and constrains the problem domain. For example, an innovative program designed to address the needs of the homeless, may provide new technology such as ”portable homes” to people living on the streets, but only confirms the resilience of the broader institutions that produce and reproduce the homeless problem, such as our built environments and our property regimes. At a local scale, it could be argued that the transistion town movement, strong in the U.K in particular, represents a deliberate effort to ”decouple” from the broader economic and institutional system in order to secure local resilience in the face of possible collapse of the broader system (Barry and Quilley 2009). While undoubtedly innovative, these initiatives are unlikely to stimulate the great transformation towards sustainability that we need in order to avoid pushing the earth system beyond planetary boundaries. For that we need both a disruptive innovation and a broad system adjustment to allow for its growth and impact. Fortunately, there is evidence that such disruptive or catalytic innovations are currently gaining momentum. Integrated approaches like ecosystem-based management challenge not only conventional management regimes but also the existing governance systems and legal structures since such approaches requires altered perceptions and mental models, network configurations, steering mechanisms, interaction patterns among actors, and reformed institutional and organizational structures at multiple levels (Danter et al. 2000; Bodin and Crona 2009; Olsson et al. 2010). Such management builds on the participation of a diverse set of interest groups operating at different scales, from local users, to municipalities, to regional and national organizations, and to international networks and bodies (Boyd 2008; Brondizio et al. 2009; Berkes 2010). For example, the UNESCO's Man and the Biosphere Programme supports the creation of Biosphere Reserves as learning sites and "policy laboratories" for sustainable development (e.g. UNESCO 2000; Matysek 2009; Schultz et al. 2011). The Programme links global environmental governance with place-based ecosystem management and spans local-regional, national, and international scales. The ability to match scales and address cross-scale interactions is an important part of a planetary stewardship. Combining all three frameworks for understanding system transformation we can clarify the mechanism that support breakthrough opportunities and cascades of innovation. We will look at three: ensuring an enabling context through top down incentives for innovation, ensuring a supply of innovation through identifying bottom up supply of inventive solutions, and ensuring the two are connected through nurturing institutional entrepreneurship that can anticipate and leverage crises as opportunities and designing governance processes for participation and inclusion.

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3.2.Top down: shaping the context for emergence

3.2.1 Create support and incentives for the private sector to innovate for sustainability. We have discussed above the disincentives for the private sector to engage in innovation for sustainability, despite its important role as a key driver of technological innovation. We also discussed the important role of the government or other stakeholders in creating pressure and regulation on the one hand and rewards on the other. In western economies, for example, governments find it easier to make decisions regarding positive and negative externalities if they can make a direct link to voters’ economic wellbeing. Recent studies of developing and developed economies, and oil-based and non-oil-based economies, give evidence that citizen support for renewable energy can be garnered through linking it to jobs.. In Costa Rica, job prospects were linked to “green” tourism. In Denmark, the job prospects created by reducing the country’s dependence on unreliable foreign sources of fossil fuels had a similar effect (Espinoza and Vredenburg 2010). Behaviors of corporations as well as citizens are more likely to change if the context of negative and positive sanctions is changed, rather than through direct or indirect appeal to attitudes and values (Aronson 2008) through scare tactics or other means (Feinberg and Willer 2011) Box 2: Towards a Model of Wind Energy Industry Development In a four country – Denmark, Alberta-Canada, Costa Rica and Ecuador – study of the adoption and development of the wind power, three different macro-economic conditions with respect to renewable energy development were identified: favourable, potential, and difficult.

Denmark was deemed to have favourable conditions as it was a rich country with economic resources to invest in government renewables programs and its oil industry represented an insignificant contribution to GDP. Alberta was deemed to have potential conditions as it was a rich jurisdiction with government renewables incentives inspired by international climate change commitments. But its economy was based on oil and gas development, a condition often associated with “carbon lock-in” and resistance to renewables development. Costa Rica, as a developing economy, did not have government renewables incentives but lacked indigenous fossil fuel resources and depended exclusively on hydropower which represented a risk to the national electricity system especially during dry seasons. It passed legislation allowing private sector participation in new renewable energy development. Ecuador was an oil producer and was a developing economy that lacked government resources for renewables incentives. Although the matrix shown above explained the relative degree of renewable development in the four cases studied, it could not explain why renewables were not developed in other places with similar macro-economic conditions such as France and Nicaragua. Macro-

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economics is, thus, a necessary but not sufficient framework for explaining renewable energy development. Project-specific factors constituted the rest of the explanation for renewable energy industry development in these cases. Project economics (is it ‘good business’ based on specific conditions such as a competitive technology, government incentives for energy diversification, average cost of electricity generation?), natural capital (are there good wind resources, wind data, grid access?) and social capital (networks and trust/collaborative efforts not involving direct financial transactions for obtaining key scarce information, ‘weak ties’ that local champions had with outsiders). Besides formal institutions (laws, feed-in tariffs), informal institutional factors (green culture, the role of champions/visionary leaders or environmental entrepreneurs, perception of an environmental/climate change crisis) were found to be important (see figure 4). Denmark’s environmentalism led it to renewables rather than to nuclear energy in the 1970s. Alberta environmental entrepreneurs used energy deregulation to promote wind to customers and government. Costa Rica’s history of energy self-reliance led to renewables being promoted by environmental entrepreneurs. Ecuadorian environmental entrepreneurs led the renewable charge from within utilities and government departments. Enthusiasm, conviction, and environmental commitment were some of the reasons given by these people to explain why they were getting involved in wind energy development. Espinoza, J. L. and Vredenburg, H. 2010. Towards a model of wind energy industry development in industrial and emerging economies. Global Business and Economics Review 12:223-229.

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Figure 4: Model explaining the start-up of a sustainable industry (Source: Espinoza and Vredenburg, 2010). A recent interdisciplinary study combining economics, management and legal scholarship (Kenny et al. 2011) has synthesized the research on corporate strategies aimed at innovating for sustainable development, including: knowledge development generated by stakeholders, the effect on financial performance and shareholder value of government policies and laws aimed at creating more sustainable regional economies. In this context, the role of law or regulation is ideally to reflect social expectations rather than to compel change. This represents a shift from the traditional “thou shalts” to a conception of law as reflecting aspirations for new approaches or continual improvement (Stone 1975). This, proponents of reflexive law argue, creates a positive tension between the requirement to comply with minimum standards and the desire to adapt in order to meet social expectations in a complex environment. Reflexive law is less rule-bound and recognizes that as long as certain basic procedural and organizational norms are respected, participants can arrive at positive outcomes and self-correct (Sheuerman 2001). In response to growing complexity, the detailed rules that regulated entities have been expected to follow are replaced by procedures designed to encourage thinking and behavior in the right direction, while allowing individuals to meet social norms in their own way (Orts 1995). The recent appearance of reflexive law in natural resource industries heralds an innovative role for governments, and a way that government and business can move forward in dealing with global societal issues .It is a social innovation that acknowledges the increasing hesitancy of governments to set down rules that stifle the innovative capacity of business in a competitive market environment.

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Similarly, in social innovation contexts, like the ecosystem-based management initiatives described above, setting the conditions works better than setting down rules. Like innovation in the corporate context, research suggests that adaptive learning approaches, allowing for exploration and experimentation, are better suited for ecosystem-based management than are rigid approaches that have set prescriptions for resource use (Garaway and Arthur 2004; Gunderson and Light 2006; Armitage et al. 2008; Pahl-Wostl 2007; 2011). 3.2.2 – Sponsor and stimulate experiments Tax incentives, subsidies, and competitions or challenges are also ways to focus public support and private sector ingenuity on societal challenges from climate change to biodiversity loss (Moore and Westley 2011). One of the early insights of resilience theory was the need for adaptive management, which in turn called on governments to think of policy as experiments (Holling, 2001). Recently, NESTA (National Endowment for Science, Technology and Arts), a government sponsored think tank operating in England, issued a Big Green Challenge. For the prize of 1 million pounds communities were invited to submit innovative plans for carbon reductions. Over 100 communities submitted proposals that were ranked on innovation and feasibility. Ten were accepted and the communities given some assistance in launching their initiatives. The experiments were diverse and interesting. While the winners received significant monetary rewards, even the losers had innovative projects underway at the close of the competition (NESTA 2010). The UNESCO’s Man and the Biosphere Program mentioned earlier is an international program offers a framework for stimulating sustainable development. This includes the World Network of Biosphere Reserves. Each reserve or site (564 sites in 109 countries as of April 2011) constitute a platform for learning on sustainable development and a place to experiment with various forms of integrated approaches for managing and governing natural resources and ecosystem services (Schultz et al. 2010; Nguyen et al. 2011). Experiments such as these can help prepare for a transformation by ‘beta testing’ alternative policy options. Innovations of this kind are not necessarily only local phenomena, but can have large scale effects through diffusion or scaling up, like the suggested re-greening of the Sahel (Reij and Smaling 2008) or targeted grazer control during El Niño Southern Oscillation events to restore degraded ecosystems (Holmgren and Scheffer 2001). The diffusion dynamics of innovation, and their potential positive and negative externalities, highlight the need for global level support of innovation, guided by overarching governance principles for resolving conflicts and facilitating coordination in institutionally fragmented settings (Galaz et al in review b). These issues have, alas, attracted little systematic attention from the global environmental governance community (Galaz et al. in review b). One of the barriers preventing excellent research from becoming a policy experiment at a broad scale is the siloed nature of government and other bureaucracies. Technological, social and environmental concerns are dealt with by different organizations, ministries and departments, which seldom communicate or collaborate. Experiments and innovation in government process are urgently needed, such as Denmark’s Mind Lab that brings multiple ministries together in a creative and highly facilitated environment to solve complex problems

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(Bason 2011). Similarly , the development and use of crowd sourcing platforms such as TED Wish (http://www.tedprize.org/), or Ashoka Changemakers (http://www.changemakers.com/), where an increasingly powerful and visible online organization drives innovative solution development by inviting open participation and then connects that with resources to those novel solutions, offers hope but requires further engagement of decision makers operating at the level of global governance.

3.3 Bottom up – harnessing innovative potential at local scales New internet based innovation platforms draw their transformative power from the enormous reservoirs of innovation at local levels. However, unless there is some disturbance or weakening of the institutions operating at both regime and landscape levels, these innovations may not have transformative effects. Crisis sometimes, but not always, signals such a weakening, and provides an opportunity for innovation to tip broader systems towards more sustainable trajectories. However, not all crises work that way…sometimes indeed crises leads to collapse, and recovery may be slow and compromised (Diamond 2005; Homer Dixon 2000). What distinguishes the kind of opportunities (whether through weakening resilience, or through crises) that are windows of opportunity vs. those that signal collapse? When conditions for social learning are present, particularly when there are stores of social memory to draw on, innovations have a better chance of tipping the system toward transformation than when the conditions are absent. A study of innovative responses to disasters in England underlined the need for government to relinquish orchestrating and planning and instead “engage” (listen and learn about local ideas), “educate” (inform local populations of resources and possibilities available), “empower” (trust in the potential and resourcefulness of local communities, including their long term memory of traditional responses), and “encourage” (allow a diversity of innovative responses to emerge, as opposed to insisting on a top down planning process) (Edwards, 2010). Social learning and social memory prove to be excellent sources of innovation, if nourished and engaged (Armitage et al. 2008; Barthel et al. 2010). This is illuminated further in a study from northeastern Honduras, where a climate related disaster, Hurricane Mitch, provided an opportunity for innovation in land management that led to improved wellbeing of those affected (McSweeney and Coomes 2011). Interestingly, this opportunity was not provided by the aid organizations who were brought in to manage the crisis, but rather on a household by household basis – almost “virally” – resulting in a shift to a more equitable land distribution, protected forests, and a community well positioned to cope with comparable flooding ten years later (ibid, p.5203). Innovation was facilitated by the ability to “tap into collective social memories” (ibid, p. 5205). The study revealed that the interventions of aid organizations in the local economy before Hurricane Mitch had actually heightened the community’s vulnerability. “Future interventions,” it was argued, “should foster local capacities for endogenous institutional change to enhance community resilience to climate shocks” (ibid, p.5203). A third example is a study conducted with communities in post-conflict Eritrea following the border war with Ethiopia. International aid organizations, sent in by the United Nations to support women in displaced persons camps, were met with some resistance

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and confusion when they sought to deliver the standard relief package, including treating the refugees for post traumatic stress and alleviating the famine conditions with food supplies. When researchers inquired about suspected psychological trauma, they were surprised to find that despite emotional distress caused by the war and subsequent loss of their homes, the Eritrean women in particular did not consider themselves depressed or traumatized. In fact there is no word for depression in their language; the closest approximation is “Yemenfes Chinquet” (oppression of the soul), a condition seen as originating from social rather than biological causes (Almedom et al. 2003; Almedom 2004; 1995). If you have “oppression of the soul”, you work hard to tell your story, an important cultural tradition in Eritrea, and this connection to a broader community restores a sense of coherence. Story telling workshops would have been an innovative response to displacement, but were not imagined in international response protocols. Likewise, the Eritrean refugees did not consider themselves to be starving. Drawing on traditional knowledge, they had switched to consuming “famine foods.” Similar strategies for dealing with crisis and food shortage are documented in First Nations communities (Berkes and Folke 2002; Francis 2003). All three of these studies point to the importance of engaging bottom up responses for timely and effective innovation. This requires that attention be paid to nurturing cultural norms of learning and memory. Top-down only responses to crisis often miss the opportunity for learning and innovation because of the emphasis on speed, and on avoiding blame (Walker and Westley 2011). The response to crises such as the Haitian earthquake or Hurricane Katrina, for example, effectively distributed aid to victims in the short term, but externalized long term costs, effectively overstressing and under-resourcing local community organizations so that they were worse off than before the crises. Conversely, the SARS crisis in Toronto was used as a learning opportunity for public officials to identify the hospital cultures that showed the greatest capacity to innovate in response to crisis. It turned out that these hospitals were the same ones that had been identified earlier as “magnet” hospitals – those able to attract and retain nurses. A closer study revealed that they shared a similar organizational culture: one that valued social justice, consultation across levels, decentralized decision making and self-governance, flexible scheduling, and learning (Maunder et al. 2008). There are many similarities with resilient communities that innovate in the face of disaster described above (Edwards 2010). Innovation occurs most readily in contexts where experimentation and exploration are encouraged and where these easily flow across scales, through windows of opportunity, and do not encounter barriers of repression or expert disdain. For example, Gelcich et al. (2010) describe how a new governance approach for marine resources emerged in the late 1980’s in Chile at a time of marine resource crisis and political turbulence. The resource crisis triggered a few collaboration initiatives between fishers and scientists in informal networks to start solving problems together and experimenting with new ecosystem management approaches. Political turbulence in the late 1980’s provided a window of opportunity for fishermen to organize, scale up the innovation, and influence the new national fishery legislation and institutionalization of a new governance system for marine coastal resources in Chile.

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3.4 Connecting top down and bottom up 3.4.1 Cultivate institutional entrepreneurs and shadow networks of change agents to navigate transformation and take advantage of windows of opportunity All three of the frameworks dealing with complex system transformation (transition, resilience and social innovation) suggest that there are distinct phases in the process of innovation and transformation – from invention to broad system impact (Rotmans et al. 2001; Olsson et al. 2004b, 2006). Each phase has different characteristics and demands different skills on the part of agents hoping to create pathways to sustainability (Figure 5). In the predevelopment or preparation phase, a social-ecological system, or regime, is relatively stable but increasingly unable to adapt to landscape changes on the one hand and emerging innovation niches on the other. This is termed the maturity or conservation phase in the resilience framework, when most of the capital (social, physical, intellectual, financial or cultural) is tied up in established structures and diversity is at a minimum. The resilience framework suggests that systems in this phase are prone to rigidity traps, a condition in which the invested resources are protected and existing processes subsidized, making it difficult for novel entrants (ideas, inventions, species) to gain access to the resources required to survive (Hegmon et al. 2008; Holling 2001; Westley et al. 2006; Walker et al. 2009b). As, by definition, a dominant regime is only able to optimize its internal structure and performance in an incremental way, it becomes increasingly brittle and eventually will experience systemic problems resulting in collapse or release. What follows is a chaotic process of reconfiguration requiring new strategies for reconfiguring resources and ideas. This is when innovation occurs (in the “back loop” as described by the resilience adaptive cycle). When successful, this results in new pathways, trajectories, or regimes in which elements of the old regime and novel elements are combined to form a new dominant regime coupled with new institutions. This new regime stabilizes and enters a new trajectory. Without continual integration of novelty it, too, will eventually fall into a rigidity trap.

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Figure 5: Three identified phases of a social-ecological transformation – preparing for transformation, navigating the transition, and building resilience of the new direction. A window of opportunity links the first and second phases. The transformation is illustrated in two ways: a) as a regime shift between multiple stable states, passing a threshold or b) as a tipping point (adapted from Olsson et al 2010). Systemic innovation strategies are fundamentally different from regular innovation strategies in that they are founded on notions of complexity, ambiguity and diversity. They cannot depend purely on market forces, nor can they be deliberately planned. However, agency clearly plays a role at each stage of the process. Key persons can play key roles in such learning processes including providing leadership, building trust, developing visions, and sense-making (Westley 2002; Olsson et al. 2004b; Huitema and Meijerink 2009; Gutierrez et al. 2011). These individuals can be important brokers for connecting people and networks (Bebbington 1997; Crona 2006; Ernstson et al. 2010) and also play a key role as nodes in learning networks (Manring 2007). From the perspectives of the phases of system change described above, in the conservation or preparation stage, institutional entrepreneurs interested in creating system change create small disruptions either at the landscape or regime level in the hopes of provoking a tipping point or transition point. They also watch for opportunities – crises and exogenous disturbances – to trigger a transition (Olsson et al. 2006). Frontrunners in business, science and civil society tend to develop niches of alternative ideas, technologies and lifestyles outside the mainstream. Once in the transition phase future patterns and the timing, occurrence and type of tipping points are inherently unpredictable. In this phase, institutional entrepreneurs act as conveners and sense makers, helping stakeholders develop shared ideas, discourses and narratives. These new ideas or constellations of ideas offer alternate scenarios that can help to undergird and

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bolster new innovation regimes. Scenarios in turn bolster concrete initiatives, innovations, and proposals. Institutional entrepreneurs move to a broker role here, winnowing and clustering ideas to build innovation regimes. Finally, with the transition slowing down and a new regime settling, institutional entrepreneurs watch for opportunities to “sell” these alternative innovations, and work creatively to secure the resources that will institutionalize the innovation in a new trajectory (Westley et al. 2006; Westley 2002; Olsson et al. 2004b) (see figure 6).

Figure 6: The Adaptive Cycle (based on Gunderson and Holling, 2002). While this description of phases suggests a linear process, one phase following the next, in fact institutional entrepreneurs and their networks may work simultaneously at building innovation niches into innovation regimes and at destabilizing the dominant landscape and regime to secure the required resources. At the broader institutional or landscape level, they act to “nibble” at the resilience of the dominant system, seeking opportunities in the market, the political/policy sphere and the cultural sphere, where resources can be redirected to the emerging innovation niche/regime and where elements supportive of the new regime can be inserted (See figure 7 and figure 8)

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Figure 7: Shifting Resilience

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Figure 8: Institutional entrepreneurs act at all scales to transform systems (adapted from Hill and Kolmes, 2011). They work to build the resilience of the innovation regime while reducing the resilience of the old one that created the problem in the first place. And example can be drawn from the case of the Great Bear Rain Forest in British Columbia, Canada, where a network of institutional entrepreneurs worked simultaneously to: a) destabilize the global market for old growth forest products and b) challenge the government control of tracks of pristine wilderness through native land claims in Canadian courts; c) convene stakeholders at local and provincial levels in negotiation and framing exercises, that also involved personal commitment to changed perceptions of the other actors; d) broker agreements around clusters of innovative ideas; e) sell those ideas to government and economic decision makers. (Tjörnbo et al. 2010). The success of the work institutional entrepreneurs is often dependent on timing: the occurrence of exogenous shocks, the availability of resources, the synchronicity with other trends or transitions occurring in the system (Sendzimir, et al. 2007). Skill, however, is also key, including the capacity to anticipate when an opportunity or shock will occur.

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Box 3 – Shadow Niches and Potential for Innovation in Tizra River Management Transformation from traditions of reactive flood defense to more adaptive management regimes has proven difficult in river basins. The way in which regime components reinforce each other to set its development path may induce inertia and path dependency. Transformation may require profound shifts in the institutions, technologies, and personnel, as well as the ecological, economic and social processes they influence in setting the basin’s trajectory. Regime change has become an issue in Hungary following repeated failures of conventional management policies to handle a series of floods on the Tisza River starting in 1997. A “shadow network” of activists and academics has emerged to point out how current river management appears trapped in a hopeless downward spiral of coping reactions that never build enough momentum to adapt and improve the situation. Increasing public participation catalyzed by the shadow network pushed the water policy debate toward more experimentation with alternatives, but implementation appears stalled. Here the importance of a champion to sustain dialogue until learning is enshrined in policy becomes evident. A key ministry official, J. Váradi, invited participation of the shadow network into the national policy debate and shepherded alternative ideas into a more experimental river policy (VTT2). The pivotal role of leadership became apparent when his departure from the parliamentary committee created a vacuum that neither the Ministry of Environment and Water nor the shadow network could fill as they watched the “old guard” river management fraternity reassert conventional river defense strategies. Such a rapid reversal of a major policy innovation shows the reliance of the formal policy process on incremental improvement of established practices means that forays into reframing or even transformative change are temporary and reversible despite inroads made by bottom-up participation. Since the current regime’s resilience appears to prevent it from experimenting and adapting, then navigating the transformation may involve managing resilience, i.e. first lowering it in moderately risky experiments to allow reconfiguration and then strengthening a more adaptive configuration of regime components. Source: Sendzimir et al. 2008. Assessing the resilience of a River Management Regime: Informal learning in a shadow network in the Tisza River Basin. Ecology and Society. 13(1):11. [online] URL: http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol13/iss1/art11/.

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Figure 9: Shadow innovation regimes as alternate attractors (Source: Sendzimir, J. et al, 2008). In this context, scholars have focused on the role of shadow networks, informal networks that work both outside and within the dominant system to develop alternatives that can potentially replace the dominant regime if and when the right opportunity occurs (Gunderson 1999; Olsson et al. 2006; Westley and Vredenburg, 1997). Shadow networks are incubators for new ideas and approaches, for example for governing and managing social-ecological systems (See figure 9). Pelling et al. (2008) discuss the role of shadow spaces and organizations in fostering innovation and experimentation for social learning and adaptation to climate change. As mentioned earlier, in Chile, actors within informal networks experimented with new ecosystem management approaches, readying innovations to be scaled up when a window of opportunity opened (Gelcich et al. 2010). Such bridging functions can also be carried out by various organizations. Scholars have addressed these as boundary and bridging organizations. These can lower the costs of collaboration and conflict resolution, and seem to be able to connect groups, networks and organizations, accessing and combining multiple sources of knowledge and interests, and enhancing vertical and horizontal integration and social learning (Cash and Moser 2000; Hahn et al. 2006; Berkes 2010; Schultz et al. 2011). Successful ecosystem based-management depends on adaptive governance systems that support such integrated

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management approaches (Dietz et al. 2003; Folke et al. 2005). In fact, the more successful adaptive governance systems, often emergent and self-organizing, connect individuals, networks, organizations, agencies, and institutions at multiple organizational levels with ecosystem dynamics (Folke et al. 2005; Bodin and Crona 2009; Berkes 2010). It is important to stress that transparent, and inclusive decision-making processes that are viewed as legitimate by stakeholders, is a precondition for effective adaptive governance systems to emerge and be sustained over times despite social and ecological uncertainty and surprise. This is in line with the findings of scholars in transition management (e.g. Grin et al. 2010; Loorbach 2010) who argue that the ability to co-ordinate experiments that contribute to system innovation is of crucial importance in releasing lock-ins and enabling shifts to new trajectories. Such “experiments” should broadly focus on broadening the diversity of options, ideas, organizational settings and practices (see for example Bormann and Keister 2004, Rudd 2004). In other words, building resilience requires experimentation and innovation is a key ingredient in resilience (see also Gunderson 2003). A pressing question in transformation research is how such transitions or windows of opportunity might be anticipated so that the chances for transitions to sustainability are increased. As transitions are by definition regime shifts with landscape implications, they are also by definition not favored by existing dominant interests, institutions and organizations. Path dependence at multiple levels (the sunk costs of infrastructure, organizational fraternities of engineers and their conventions on understanding and practice, traditions of land tenure, paradigms of defining systems under consideration and economic growth) stifles our adaptive capacity, and, hence, innovation. Thus the strategic challenge for transition governance is to try to coordinate emerging innovations toward systemic change while simultaneously opening up (or alternatively: breaking down) unsustainable regimes and institutions. When capacity is raised by diverse sets of experiments, our increased learning capability can do two things: lower the need to predict tipping points because we can cope better, and increase our understanding of the system’s dynamics such that we might better predict and catalyze tipping points. Sudden and surprising transitions, such as that recently witnessed in Egypt, can perhaps be anticipated in a general way, but from the point of view of institutional entrepreneurs and shadow networks, having some indications of the criticality of a system, the likelihood of tipping points, and the emergence of alternative trajectories would be extremely helpful. Work in ecology has suggested that a pattern of critical slowing down and autocorrelation may signal a critical transition (Scheffer et al. 2009). Can this be applied to social systems as well? Where would this data be found? Could social media perhaps supply indicators (Galaz et al. 2010)? Equally important would be the knowledge of what innovation regimes are available to act as alternate attractors. As we have seen, not all crises lead to positive and innovative outcomes. 3.4.2. Encourage distributed decision-making and participation in governance at all scales Approaches to governance and pathways to sustainability are intimately intertwined in at least two ways. Which pathways are pursued and which are not is in large part a question

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of governance: a politics of narratives and pathways shaped by power relations and institutional interests. This leads to a second inherent linkage: that political and institutional processes are often key factors implicated within the narratives and pathways themselves. We need to understand how particular narratives give rise to certain dominant innovation pathways shaped by powerful interests, often with substantial financial and institutional backing. These are the “motorways,” if you will, that direct current mainstream environment and development efforts and guide investments in agricultural science and technology. But these dominant pathways can often obscure or even overrun alternatives, the less-travelled “byways,” “shadow tracks,” or innovation regimes that define and respond to different sets of goals, values, and forms of knowledge, presenting alternatives to mainstream strategies for dealing with complex and dynamic social, ecological and technological change and responding to shocks and stresses. (Leach et al. 2010). Box 4: Innovation, Sustainability and Pathways to Food Futures Let us take the case of the release of new hybrid and genetically modified cereal seed varieties in African settings. In recent years, a discernable shift towards risk-based framings has become evident in dominant policy narratives around the introduction of GM crops in particular countries and in regional debates on stimulating a new Green Revolution for Africa (Scoones and Thompson, forthcoming). Along with narratives that emphasise “drought tolerant” (non-GM, hybrid) and “water efficient” (GM) seeds as solutions to problems of hunger (a common narrative widely promoted by the seed industry and others) have come pressures from the international agricultural research community, government and civil society actors alike, to seriously address the areas of incomplete knowledge surrounding these technologies, their application and potential impacts. In the case of drought tolerant seed varieties, research conducted by the STEPS Centre at the University of Sussex with partners in Kenya on environmental change and maize innovation pathways has shown that despite their use of a language of ‘adaptation’ and ‘resilience’, initiatives that rely on a linear ‘pipeline’ innovation approach (and its associated regulatory framework) remain locked in to a risk-stability management model that is unlikely to match, let alone enhance, the adaptive capacity of households and communities in marginal environments. In particular, interventions focused on strengthening and extending the formal maize system at the expense of local, informal systems threaten to undermine those sources of diversity from which people in different localities need to draw if they are to build livelihoods that are both resilient to shocks and robust in the face of longer- term stresses (; Brooks et al. 2009; Thompson et al. 2010; Thompson et al. forthcoming). With regard to new GM seed technologies, the creation and adoption of national biosafety regulations has been a key response (most recently in Kenya). Yet, in many cases, these frame the issue in terms of narrow notions of risk (to ecology or human health), at the expense of the recognition of the uncertainty, ambiguity and ignorance involved. This is encouraged by the expectation of alignment with the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety to the Convention on Biological Diversity, an international agreement which aims to ensure the safe handling, transport and use of living modified organisms resulting from modern biotechnology that may have adverse effects on biological diversity, taking

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also into account risks to human health. The organisational mandates of ministries of agriculture in many African countries emphasise the promotion of effective agricultural technologies and minimizing the risks involved, hence working against an openness to uncertainty and surprise. The use of particular kinds of scientific evidence in defining outcomes and then aggregating them in ways that can be translated into clear regulations works against appreciation of ambiguities (Millstone et al. 2009). These might include diverse perspectives on the nature of outcomes and why they matter – for instance emphasising how bioengineered seeds might interact with particular agro-ecological settings or livelihood priorities. Governance pressures in the construction of national biosafety and formal seed system regulations also tend to address uncertainties as if they were manageable risks (Millstone and Thompson 2010). The very notion of regulation encourages a view that outcomes are calculable and therefore amenable to regulatory oversight (van Zwanenberg et al. 2009; van Zwanenberg et al. 2010;). The top-down planning procedures that characterise many ministries of agriculture, along with the entrenched bureaucratic routines and hierarchies that they have developed, only serve to reinforce this view. Meanwhile, established planning processes and bureaucratic procedures work against the incorporation of field-level knowledge – that of local extension workers or farmers themselves. The diversity of farmers’ fields and livelihood dynamics throw up a range of areas of uncertainty and ambiguity in the possible impacts of GM seeds, as they intersect with these complex social-ecological contexts. Yet the governance processes through which biosafety regulations are created and implemented in Africa are not able to incorporate such perspectives. Instead, regulatory processes often contribute to the labelling of farmers in particular ways – generally as “ignorant” or “risk-averse.” And through processes of subjectification, farmers may themselves come to represent themselves in such ways, at least in situations in which they interact with authority. Thus, we see how political, institutional and knowledge-related processes interact in agriculture to push policy narratives towards framing GM safety issues simply in terms of risk (van Zwanenberg et al. 2009; van Zwanenberg et al. 2010;). Tapping these “shadow tracks” then becomes a key challenge to governance, especially because traditional, expert-driven, centralized and top-down approaches to problem solving aren’t nimble enough to effectively address convergent, nonlinear, and rapidly changing global problems characterized by high uncertainty. What this suggests is that we need to bring together and apply to these problems as many different ideas – and as many different heads – as possible to trigger real transformations toward global sustainability. Here is where emerging social media and associated advances in information and communication technologies can play a role. Because of its distributed nature, the Internet can make possible the rapid decentralized innovation our world urgently needs. It can help generate financial and political support for safe-fail experiments in communities around the world, using diverse technologies, organizations, and ideas. This capacity cannot be taken for granted however. We are already experiencing severe sustainability challenges facilitated by rapid information technological change. Examples here include not only rapid online coordination aiming to undermine the authority of climate science as illustrated all too to clearly during "Climategate", and hackers breaking

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into carbon market databases, but also the acceleration of the destruction of natural resources. This last concern was raised during the last meeting of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) in 2010, where the case of Internet trade with threatened species was widely debated. This calls for an explicit approach to direct the decentralized power of the Internet in ways that contribute to transformations towards sustainability. Scientists have found that all complex systems that are highly adaptive, like markets, tend to share certain features. First of all, the individual elements that make up the systems, such as companies in a market economy are extraordinarily diverse. Second, the power to make decisions and solve problems isn’t centralized in one place or thing; instead, it’s distributed across the system’s elements. The elements are then linked in a loose network that allows them to exchange information about what works and what doesn’t. Often in a market economy, for example, several companies will be working at the same time to solve different parts of a shared problem, and important information about solutions will flow between them. Third, highly adaptive systems are unstable enough to create unexpected innovations but orderly enough to learn from their failures and successes. Systems with these three features stimulate constant experimentation, and they generate a variety of problem-solving strategies. The Internet and its subsystem, the World Wide Web, exhibit exactly these features. So they could be the foundation for rapid problem solving and "knowledge generation" on a planetary scale; for a new generation of ecological monitoring systems (Galaz et al. 2010); for more effective multinational scientific collaboration (Royal Society 2010); for polycentric experiments that increase social-ecological resilience; and for radically new forms of democratic decision-making. Most fundamentally however, it can facilitate the conversation we must have among ourselves to identify and realize innovative approaches that support planetary stewardship and help us stay within critical planetary boundaries. To date, though, open-source approaches have been applied to solving technical problems like the creation of complex software, large databases, or online encyclopaedias. Now we urgently need to explore if we can use this kind of approach – and the culture of voluntarism that underpins it – to address our bedeviling social, political, and environmental problems like climate change. Research and experimentation on such innovation platforms as crowd thinking and design thinking are underway and hold promise for accelerating social innovation that addresses complex problems such as environmental issues (Brown 2009; Rockefeller Foundation 2008). Positive examples here include Internet based micro-finance initiatives such as Kiva.org; knowledge sharing platforms for climate adaptation and water and sanitation innovations such as http://www.weadapt.org/ and http://www.akvo.org/; problem solving virtual platforms such as the MIT Center Collective Intelligence project CoLab; and Internet based approaches to assist the emergence of innovative ideas such as InnoCentive and Environmental Defense Fund Eco-Challenge Series. Examples also point to the convening and mobilizing power of social media. With the help of the advances in information and communication technologies including satellite technologies, social mobilization has taken place around efforts to curb both illegal deforestation and

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surprising outbreaks of large scale forest fires in the Amazon (Foster Brown 2006), the illegal and unreported fishing in Antarctica (Österblom et al. 2010b; Folke et al. 2011).

While recognizing that open-source methods can’t give us clear and final solutions to problems that are ultimately rooted in politics, they’re still a powerful way to develop scenarios and experiment with ideas. If these methods are coupled with a the skills and capacity to engage in transdisciplinary, cross sectoral problem solving, to design processes to sustain knowledge integration and behavioral change, they can help us build worldwide communities of like-minded people who, in the course of working together on tasks, become bound together by trust and by shared values and understandings. The growing interest on the part of governments, universities and think tanks in Change Labs is promising. Such change labs offer a place for creative, cross sectoral and cross disciplinary decision making and innovation. The process is supported by careful design and facilitation and is resourced by research geared to the decision maker’s needs. The focus is on those ‘wicked problems’ that seem insoluble, and reconciling seemingly antithetical elements such as the need to grow the economy and to maintain environmental services, or to maximize both short term profitability and long termsustainability. (Banerjee 2008; Bason 2011)..

Box 5: Stanford ChangeLabs The ChangeLabs model and methodology initiated at Stanford, represents a unique and powerful approach to attacking large-scale challenges. It combines some of the most actionable elements from diverse fields in order to create a rubric and methodology that is directed at large scale transformations. The four main components of Design Intelligence are (i) Design Thinking Methods (ii) Trans-disciplinary Configurations (iii) Heuristics for Scale and Scaling (iv) Design Intelligence: A framework for Systemic Transformations ChangeLabs emerged in response to the premise that the scale, urgency, and complexity of challenges facing humankind are a class of challenge that requires an entirely new thinking and approach. Current processes are locked within the confines of individual fields or institutional practices and as a result, fall far short of creating integrative, systemic and scaled transformations necessary for challenges of this magnitude and pervasive nature. The ChangeLabs structure looks at problems and solutions as socio-economic-technological-business-regulatory-behavioral-infrastructural systems. One of the basic building blocks of this approach is Design Thinking. It is an approach that has emerged out of the design field, and has proved itself as a tremendously powerful integrative process and approach. Design Thinking frames issues in terms of genuine insights about underlying and causal forces, followed by a highly proactive process in strategizing and implementing interventions that are at the nexus of human, technological, business, organizational, and regulatory realms. This is a technique that uses creativity to significantly outperform normative methods and generate interventions that are at once actionable and strategic. It is also notable for its role as a catalyst, and bringing about meaningful trans-disciplinary and trans-agency co-creation.

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Trans-disciplinary and trans-agency co-creation is distinct from inter or multi-disciplinary collaborations in crucially important ways. Trans-disciplinary approaches create new methodologies and thinking. They strategically combine the power of different fields in ways that transcends the limits of each of the component fields, creates a new field in terms of the meta-level regime and influences changes in the component fields. Trans-disciplinary approaches allow for new “challenge-centric” processes, rather than merely disciplinary advances or working within current institutional limitations. As an example, the ARPA-E funded Energy and Climate Change project at Stanford University’s most notable attribute is the combination of theories from behavior sciences with innovation techniques and going about connecting dots between energy policy, technology strategy, behavior change theories from multiple behavioral science fields, design of business ecosystems, and design of tangible human experiences that would propel new norms and patterns of system b Innovations in the private sector tend not to generate systemic benefit while policy tends to make incremental changes rather than radical ones. The Design Intelligence framework combines creation of a new paradigm with diffusion techniques for rapid scaling. It also forces innovations that simultaneously generate positive impact on economic, social, and environmental fronts in order to create “next generation” ecosystems. The Design Intelligence Framework and the ChangeLab model is being seen as a strategic tool business leaders and policy makers to shape initiatives for systemic large-scale transformations. Drawn from Banarjee, B. 2008 Designer as Agent of Change: A Vision for Catalyzing Rapid Change, Changing the Change Conference Proceedings, Torino, Italy. [online] URL: www.changingthechange.org One may argue that humanity is again poised for a big leap, as in the early days of Industrial Revolution. In addition to the information technology alluded to above, revolutions in microbiology and genetics and nano-technology are now taking off and will no doubt create waves of change (Wolfenberger and Phifer 2000; Mnyusiwalla et al. 2003; Andrianantoandro et al. 2006; Gibson et al. 2010). At the same time, the new global dynamics of connectivity, mobility, multiplications of linkages, speed of interactions and new combinations of social-ecological shocks and surprises move humanity into very new and unknown terrain (Folke et al. 2011; Steffen et al. 2011). Nurturing diversity of options and of innovation pathways seems to be a significant strategy to build transformative capacity (Olsson et al. 2010). To achieve this, however, we must be attentive to the challenge of maintaining and integrating diversity (whether in crop or livestock gene pools, languages, ideas, or technologies and practices). If all innovation is a recombination of existing elements, as we have noted above, then the diversity and number of ideas, elements, and technologies available will define the depth of innovative potential. Diversity, hence, provides a rich resource for innovation, and innovation ,as we have seen, is essential for the resilience and security of social and -ecological systems (Millstone et al. 2009; Thompson and Scoones, 2009). In a world of increasing momentum around globalisation, harmonisation and standardisation, diversity could provide a means to preserve crucial context-

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dependent sensitivities – whether these are agro ecological, socio-cultural or technological- ensuring that “not all eggs are in one basket.” Only by nurturing diversities of innovation pathways can we confidently reduce vulnerability, empower the least advantaged and promote sustainable futures (STEPS Centre 2010). The role of governance in this is the creation of “space for innovation” and “transition arenas” – that is bringing together networks of diverse actors that develop new and shared understanding of how they collectively can influence dysfunctional and path-dependent systems, such as food security, water and waste management and energy supply (Loorbach 2007). In addition, governance systems should be attentive to nurturing and coordinating mechanisms that serve to linking innovations to resources. Such coordinating mechanisms could be shared mental constructs, discourses, language, expectations, incentives and regulations. Social media can help neutralize vested interests and create advocacy for change. Identifying and supporting key change agents is also vital. But whether these ideas are taken up, resourced and implemented at a scale sufficiently vast to affect the problem of planetary boundaries, is an open question, to explored by the global governance community (Nilsson and Persson 2011; Galaz et al. in review b). A positive outcome will depend as much on the action of clever individuals with a deep understanding of systems and of the processes required to change them, as it will on clever scientists with a deep knowledge of the challenges.

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