Green Urban Transport Policies and Cleantech Innovations: Evidence from Curitiba, Göteborg and Hamburg

Abstract

Facing climate change challenges, many local governments worldwide became active deploying green urban transport policies (GUTP). By doing so, their central objective was to curb CO₂ emissions and manage the latent tension between accessibility, mobility and quality of life. However, in some cases, those policies indirectly foster the localized development of cleantech innovations. In this paper, we analyse in-depth the mechanisms through which this phenomenon takes place. Combining literatures from innovation studies and economic geography, we ground our analysis on the experiences of three cities active in GUTP: Curitiba (Brazil), Göteborg (Sweden) and Hamburg (Germany). We start by framing the emergence and development of GUTP within a co-evolutionary context. Subsequently, for each case, we decompose the relevance of GUTP in providing a mix of incentives to cleantech innovation processes: (i) levering technological exploration; (ii) providing room for experimentation and testing and (iii) creating ground for exploitation and demonstration of new technologies. We illustrate how GUTP can foster rich processes of localized learning, but also support local anchoring and diffusion of cleantech mobile knowledge.

Acknowledgements

We express our gratitude to the persons who shared their experiences with us in Curitiba, Göteborg and Hamburg, with special thanks to Anders Larsson, Björn Sandén, Jaime Lerner, Olga Firkowski and Peter Danielsson. We are grateful to Lars Coenen and Bernhard Truffer, for organizing a special session at the Washington DC's 2010 AAG in which this paper was first presented and discussed. Many thanks are also due to Erwin van Tuijl and Willem van Winden for their comments on previous versions, as well as to the reviewers who greatly contributed to sharpen the paper's arguments. The fieldwork of this study was funded by the City of Rotterdam and by the Institute for Housing and Urban Development Studies (IHS). Luís Carvalho also acknowledges the financial support of FCT—Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology.

Notes

Actually, in many studies, policy is endogenized as a key determinant of technological transitions and the development of innovation systems.

Although implicitly recognizing that innovation processes and transitions take place at multiple and co-influencing spatial levels (international, national, regional), the extant literatures tend to put the focus on states and nations as spatial units of analysis and pass fast through local and regional specificities, leaving them underexplained.

The same can be said for, e.g. universities, often plugged in external-to-the-region knowledge sources through manifold research projects (Benneworth and Hospers, 2007).

Adapted by Cooke (2005), based on March (1991).

Note that in practice general and regulatory based solutions might also favour specific, better implanted technology solutions (e.g. first generation biofuels).

The elements included in the tables depict the most critical turning points, triggers and key illustrations of cumulative change in the cities and related spaces (e.g. state, country, internationally). More detailed and extensive accounts can be obtained with the authors.

For example, EU and National regulations and policies can trigger GUTP at the local level, and also the other way around.

Note that the amplification and mutual enforcement might be positive or negative, e.g. when a different technological track is selected at the national level, implying the decay or lost of momentum for certain activities at the local and regional level.

The content of these three categories and associated mechanisms inductively emerged out of our research data and inductive reasoning; however, after that process and in order to align them with extant literatures, we fit the categories under the distinction proposed by Cooke (2005) for the stages of an innovation process: “exploration”, “experimentation” and “exploitation”.