A publication by TIPC’s Matias Ramirez, Alejandra Boni, Rob Byrne, and RAND Europe’s Imogen Wade explores the role of mutable fluid space in experimental policy engagements.
In the face of social and environmental challenges, there is a growing call for science, technology, and innovation (STI) policy. Consequently, there has been a focus on policy processes that support sustainability transitions. One significant call has been for the development of a new “meta-framework” for STI policy (Schot and Steinmueller, 2018), designed to be applicable across different geographies. Such a framework aims to articulate imaginaries, policies, public funding, and private investment around common themes.
The paper proposes incorporating insights from policy mobility and actor-network theory to address questions of policy transfer, policy scaling, and policy adaptation for Transformative Innovation Policy (TIP) from a sustainability transitions perspective. This approach aims to capture some of the complexity and treat transitions in a spatially sensitive manner.
Key highlights of the publication:
Innovative insights on spatiality: The paper enriches the discourse on policy transitions by examining how policy frameworks traverse physical and cognitive spaces.
Fluid spaces in policy development: It proposes that constructing “fluid spaces” where professionals from academia, policy making, and industry converge can drive successful transformative innovation.
Spatially sensitive framework: A new framework is introduced to explore how policies are translated across different spaces through three experimental policy engagements.
Identifying pathways: The research identifies both immutable and relational pathways that demonstrate how policy frameworks adapt as they move across diverse geographies.
Policy processes involve negotiations between different forms of policy governance in different geographies. The dynamics and tensions these negotiations create can help to explain some of the complexities and inconsistencies in both the policy processes and outcomes observed. Furthermore, they can help to understand how new TIP travels between different geographies and from academic to policy-making environments.
The paper discusses the TIP approach more widely and provides an explanation of TIPC. By examining three TIP experiments, implemented in different countries and organisations, the article contributes to debates around the spatiality of sustainability transitions and practices through a focus on policy mobility for transformative innovation. In addition, the paper may contribute to understanding how initiatives such as TIPC can be more productive for advancing a policy agenda of sustainability transitions across different countries and geographies.
To read more, access the full publication here.