Environment and Social Innovation: Why Technology Never Was the Solution

For environmental protection, innovation in products and processes is often seen as the ideal solution. Contributing to economic activity while being ‘environmentally friendly’, it tends to have the favour of all, notably industry and governments. This paper takes the question of environmental protection from another angle and claims that it mainly relies on other kinds of tools than technical innovation—namely compensation schemes, norms, spatial zoning, Environmental Impact Assessments, economic instruments, management techniques, audits, lifecycle analysis, labels, etc. These tools are political, economic and legal in nature and they aim at controlling technical progress and its unwanted, negative side effects. Considering day-to-day usages of these tools, how they are concretely deployed, the compromises that define them, and the actors who mobilize them, it leads to an image that is less optimistic than the one often associated with innovation and green technologies. What it shows is the gap between claims and results, and the fact that these tools do not lead to serious reductions of environmental problems—the key reason being the unwillingness to alter growth and development, to transform our modes of production and our ways of life.