System Innovations towards Sustainability Using Stakeholder Workshops and Scenarios

With a growing world population and increasing global economic wealth, radical changes to our production and consumption patterns are required to achieve sustainable development. Some claim that we have to improve our environmental efficiency by a Factor 4, which would enable the world to double its wealth while halving its environmental burden. Others stress that we will have to fulfil social needs in 2050 twenty times more environmentally efficiently, i.e. by a Factor 20. Obviously, these will require both technological and cultural changes in complex societal transitions towards sustainability. Solutions will have to be found in technological system innovations in combination with profound change in lifestyle and culture, reducing resource-intensive modes of consumption. In this paper we aim to explore how system innovations could contribute to a sustainable development, how they can be initiated in a multi-actor context and it will be briefly explored how they can be linked to relevant stakeholder and innovation theories. System innovations are very complex and characterised here by: the large number of variables; the large number of actors involved; the combination of different innovations, the soft innovations required (e.g. rules, legislation, paradigms, social structures, perceptions); and, the (system) changes when implementing it in society. We will illustrate it with examples and results from both the STD programme in the Netherlands and, the European project ‘Strategies towards the sustainable household (SusHouse)’. However, we will focus on the latter using results from the Nutrition or Shopping, Cooking & Eating function in the Netherlands as an example. A stakeholder workshop methodology will be presented as an example of organising interaction processes for system innovations, while also reference will be made to the role of normative scenarios when dealing with stakeholders from different societal groups having different reference frames. The stakeholder workshop methodology has been developed as part of the European Union funded research project, ‘Strategies towards the sustainable household (SusHouse)’ and consists of two series of workshops. The first series of creativity workshops were meant for generating sustainable future visions or normative scenarios that were assessed for economic credibility, environmental reductions and consumer acceptance. A second set of workshops was meant for developing strategies and policies for achieving the scenarios including concrete implementation proposals and stakeholder co-operation on the short term. In the second series of workshops stakeholders from industry, government, universities and public interest groups used back-casting techniques for achieving this. Backcasting is ‘first a description of the desired future (as a future vision or a normative scenario) followed by the identification of the steps and changes that are necessary to achieve that future. Back-casting is the opposite of forecasting, which uses the present situation as a starting point’. Results of this stakeholder workshop methodology for the SusHouse case study of Shopping, Cooking and Eating (Nutrition) in the Netherlands will be reported in this paper. The paper concludes as to the applications of this stakeholder workshop methodology, its limitations, and its implications as to system innovation processes.