Environmental Policy and Industrial Innovation: Integrating Environment and Economy Through Ecological Modernisation
Joseph Murphy, Andrew Gouldson
Abstract
This chapter reviews the nature of industrial innovation and its outputs. It highlights the significance of barriers to innovation and argues that these barriers justify regulatory intervention. The generic characteristics of the innovation process are reflected in the various options available to companies seeking to improve their environmental performance. More particularly, the chapter suggests that regulation can help companies to overcome the short-term barriers to innovation that commonly prevent them from moving beyond control technologies to consider clean technologies, from complementing technological change with organisational change and from exploring the strategic as well as operational opportunities for improvement. Regulation can be used to drive the process of industrial innovation with environmental and economic gains realised as a result. Ecological modernisation is not viewed as something that is real but instead it is examined as a set of attractive ideas which are adopted and communicated by policy elites.