Experimenting for Sustainable Transport: the Approach of Strategic Niche Management
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Experimenting for Sustainable Transport Transport, Development and Sustainability Series editor: David Banister, Professor of Transport Planning, University College London European Transport Policy and Sustainable Mobility David Banister, Dominic Stead, Peter Steen, Jonas Åkerman, Karl Dreborg, Peter Nijkamp and Ruggero Schleicher-Tappeser The Politics of Mobility: transport, the environment and public policy Geoff Vigar Experimenting for Sustainable Transport: the approach of Strategic Niche Management Remco Hoogma, René Kemp, Johan Schot and Bernard Truffer Transport Planning Second Edition David Banister David Banister Dominic Stead Peter Steen Remco Hoogma René Kemp Johan Schot Bernhard Truffer Experimenting for Sustainable Transport The approach of Strategic Niche Management I~ ~~o~;~;n~~~up LONDON AND NEW YORK First published 2002 by Routledge Published 2017 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon O14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Copyright © 2002 Remco Hoogma, René Kemp, Johan Schot and Bernhard Truffer The right of Remco Hoogma, René Kemp, Johan Schot and Bernhard Truffer to be identified as the Authors of this Work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 Typeset in Sabon and Imago by NP Design & Print, Wallingford, Oxfordshire The Open Access version of this book, available at www.tandfebooks.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested 3. Transportation—Environmental aspects. 4. Transportation—Social aspects. I. Title. II. Series HE193.V54 2001 ISBN 978-0-415-27116-5 (hbk) ISBN 978-0-415-27117-2 (pbk) Contents The Authors ix Preface vii List of Abbreviations xi 01 Technological Fixes 1 The approach of Strategic Niche Management 4 SNM and sustainable development 5 Content of the book 8 02 Nurtured Spaces 12 Why is there under-utilization of sustainable technologies in transport? 13 The structured nature of technological change: technological regimes and paradigms 18 Dynamics of regime-shifts 20 Defining Strategic Niche Management 29 03 Promises for Sustainable Transport 36 Rudimentary analysis of land-based passenger transport regime 36 Promising niches for passenger transport 39 Promising niches for public transport 43 Future transport 45 Electrifying mobility 47 Reconfiguring mobility 49 04 Experiments in Electrifying Mobility 53 The early years: competition with gasoline cars 53 vi Experimenting for sustainable transport Strategies for experiments 63 Rügen Island: testing the latest components 67 The PIVCO experience: ecological product differentiation 75 La Rochelle: market differentiation 85 Mendrisio: new mobility option 93 Lessons from the experiments 109 05 Experiments in Reconfiguring Mobility 123 Competition between gasoline cars and public transportation 124 Mixing public and private transport – a new trend? 127 Experimental strategies 130 Portsmouth’s Bikeabout bicycle-pool scheme: getting people out of their cars 133 Camden’s Accessible Sustainable Transport Integration (ASTI): customizing public transport 139 The Swiss mobility co-operative: car-sharing and collective car ownership 147 Praxitèle: individualized public transport in France 161 Experimental findings 171 Reconfiguring mobility revisited 174 06 Strategic Niche Management 180 Experiments and niche development 182 Improving experiments – the managerial lessons from SNM 190 What do the cases tell us about SNM? 194 SNM as a tool for transition 198 SNM as a modern tool of governance 201 An agenda for SNM research and niche management 202 Index 206 Authors Remco Hoogma is a Programme Manager at NOVEM, responsible for the electric and hybrid vehicle programme. NOVEM is the Dutch organization responsible for the implementation of government programmes in the field of energy and the environment. At the time of the research for the book he was employed as a research fellow at the University of Twente’s Centre for Studies of Science, Technology and Society. He has a broad research expertise in transportation, environmental and technology issues, and has recently finished a PhD thesis on the subject of technological niches for electric vehicles. René Kemp is a Senior Research Fellow at the Maastricht Economic Research Institute on Innovation and Technology (MERIT), Maastricht University and Research Director of Science, Technology and Economic Policy (STEP) in Oslo. He is an expert on environmental policy and technology, a topic on which he has published extensively and on which he is consulted by the European Commission and OECD. His book Environmental Policy and Technical Change is an authoritative work on the subject. His current work focuses on system innovation and transitions to sustainability. He has published in economic, policy science and social science journals. His work on transition management is adopted by Dutch environmental policy- makers. Johan Schot is Professor in Social History of Technology at Eindhoven University of Technology and University of Twente. He is Scientific Director of the Foundation for the History of Technology and Programme Leader of the National Research Programme on the History of Technology in the Netherlands in the 20th Century. He is chairing (with Ruth Oldenziel) the European Science Foundation Network Tensions of Europe, Technology in the Making of Twentieth Century Europe. His research work and publications range from history of technology, science and technology studies, innovation and diffusion theory to constructive technology assessment, environmental management and policy studies. viii Experimenting for sustainable transport Bernhard Truffer is a senior scientist at the Swiss Federal Institute for Environmental Science and Technology. He has published on innovation- oriented environmental policy in general and on transport in particular. He studied user experiences with electric vehicles and organized car sharing in Switzerland. Currently he is heading a large Swiss research project on the definition of Green Power standards in liberalized electricity markets. Preface This book grew out of a dissatisfaction with the way insights gained from technology studies, evolutionary economics, constructivist sociology and history of technology are put to use in the policy realm, or in fact, are hardly used. It is our belief that scholars must transform their insights into enlightening and flexible tools that can be taken up by practitioners working in govern- ments, in businesses, NGOs and other organizations. The philosophical justifica- tion for most technology policy activities has remained unchanged for decades: because various forms of market failure lead to underinvestment in research and development (R&D), governments must stimulate such investments. An additional role often assigned to government is to educate users and wider publics to accept and embrace new solutions coming from R&D investments. In our view, over-emphasis on issues of market failure and user acceptance has resulted in the neglect of other new and promising technology policy options, especially in the area of sustainable development. Here, new theoretical insights underscore the importance of shaping technological content, enabling the articulation and construction of new user needs and defining and negotiating the course towards sustainable development. These processes are neither purely technical, nor simple exercises in the diffusion of knowledge. Effective technology policy, in our view, is an open learning process, a series of experiments with the introduction of new technologies. Our book develops a tool – Strategic Niche Management – to help think about these learning processes. It offers a number of suggestions on how to set-up experiments. It also gives the reader access to theoretical insights, and case studies of actual experiments showing how these insights help to understand and explain what is going on. This book has a long history. The idea of Strategic Niche Management developed out of a research programme developed at the University of Twente in the Netherlands collaborating with MERIT, University of Maastricht in the mid-1990s. Strategic Niche Management is part of an attempt to understand better technical change and its relationship to economic and societal changes. This goal is simple: to help various actors in society to build more constructive relationships with new technologies, saving them from the naive belief in either the transformative myth of the ‘technical fix’ or the destructive criticism that new technologies cannot be part of any solution. This book grew out of a project supported by the European Commission, DG XII, within the area ‘Human Dimensions of Environmental Change’ of the x Experimenting for sustainable transport RTD Programme ‘Environment and Climate’, and we wish to express our gratitude for the support. The starting point of this project was the observed under-utilization of available transport technologies that might contribute to sustainable development. We focused on sixteen case studies of actual experiments. The project involved a team of excellent researchers. We would like to thank Kanehira Maruo, Birgitta Schwarz, Gerhard Prätorius, Karl-Heinz Lehrach,