The themes of technological innovation, entrepreneurship, and organizing

INNOVATION FOR DEMATERIALIZATION

Undoubtedly, the main driving force that orients innovation processes towards sustainability goals, is the geopolitics of economic globalizaton and sustainable development that has been set-up since the UN World Conference on the Human Environment in 1972, to the Johanesbourg Summit on Environment and Sustainable Development in 2002, through the Eco-Rio Conference in 1992 and all their outcomes (Agenda 21, MEAs, Conven­tions on Biodiversity and Climate Change, Kyoto protocol, Clean Development Mechanism, etc.) that configure today the dominant vision, strategy that rules the World and national environmental policies.

Within that scope, one major project that has set in motion more specific actions towards techno - economic and managerial innovations has been the one to dematerialize production, set in motion by the Wuppertal Institute in 1993, and followed by the Factor 10 Institute founded in 1997 fol­lowed by the International Factor 10 Innovation Network in 1998. Ernst Ulrich von Weizsacker (1997) published his idea of dematerializing by a Factor 4, advocating a resource strategy founded on reducing resource use by means of what he called “efficiency revolution”. This idea was challenged and further developed by Friedrich Smidt-Bleek, who proposed a tenfold demateri­alization of western technologies on average as a conditio sine qua non for approaching economic sustainability. To achieve that goal, by 2050, the worldwide average per capita consumption shall not exceed 8 tons of material per year; a per capita ecological footprint of 1.8 has, a per capita consumption of 5-6 yearly tons of non-renewable material resources and an emission of CO2 not exceeding 2 tons per year per person. These sustainable economic conditions could only be reached by increasing the resource productivity of the industrialized countries (Schmidt-Bleek, 2008). If the worldwide consumption of nature had to be reduced by a factor of 2, but up to 8 million people had to “grow” in order to satisfy their basic needs intended by the market economy in place, then the industrialized countries had to make the extra effort to dematerialize by a factor of 10. If the advanced economies are the societies of knowledge of our times, how could they doubt their capacities to trigger the innovations neces­sary to reach the desired sustainable economy? Thus, within the prevalent rationality, and with the intent of reestablishing the ecological balance in the economy, a campaign for eco-innovation was launched1.

The basic assumptions and imperatives upon which this intended dematerialization was based on were no other than the wishful thinking prin­ciples of some of the first and main proponents of ecological economics: (a) The human economy must be constrained to function within the limits of the environment and its resources and in such a way that it works with the grain of, rather than against, natural laws and processes; (b) We must adjust our wealth and prosperity-generating machine to operate within the guardrails of the laws of nature; (c) “if too much environmentally dangerous material escapes at the back-end of an economy, one should curb the input streams of natural resources at the front end of the wealth machine.”

Schmidt-Bleek thinks it is “the rucksack of finished products rather than the process of manu­facturing what determines the overall resource intensity ofthe economy”; he recognizes that “life - sustaining services of the environment cannot be generated by technology at any cost”, and that “the present price situation allows only rather limited dematerialization moves under profitable condi­tions”. Yet he affirms that “Sustainability is won on the market or not at all.” (Schmidt-Bleek, p.3).

In practice, dematerialization implied the cal­culation of the limited materials that the Earth can offer and the overdose of nature that enters and is consumed by the economic machine. Measured as Material Input per Service rendered at the micro level (MIPS), total yearly material flows (TAPS) and cost per unit service or utility (COPS), the Factor 10 project intends to reduce material flows and increase resource productivity in a service oriented economy.

And the work to do was delivered to faith in the workings of the market economy and technologi­cal innovation. There is no hint at deconstructing, but only mending and reshaping the established wealth machine. From the fact that the economy will not listen and adjust to the imperatives of nature, that it will not reach by consciousness and planning a steady state that would allow for ecological balance, then the next step has been to call for de-growth and de-coupling the economy from nature, a step back again to the false pre­tention of having an economy working delinked away from nature. And with more arrogance than critical spirit and openness to other thinking, experiences and practices, he pontificates with Eurocentric pride that

“Europe may be the only region in the world where the necessary experiences, both shameful and brilliant, have sprung from its history, and where the human and technical genius exists to lead humankind toward a more sustainable future.” (Ibid.)

As we will see in what follows, there is some­thing more to expect of alternative knowledge, thinking, experiences and practices from other corners and latitudes of the planet that are open­ing new perspectives for the social construction of sustainability.

From the standpoint of environmental rational­ity and the perspectives to sustainability conceived in the South, eco-innovation appears more as a will to de-grow the economy than to refurnish and remodel it with ecological balances and energy flow calculations, with ecological footprints and economic valuation instruments. The proposal to de-grow the economy is based not only on an increase of resources productivity, efficiency of “throughput” and recycling and restriction in con­sumption, but on the innovation of new production processes and consumption patterns (Latouche, 2006, 2009). Notwithstanding this broad program of de-growing, it remains a fatuous will if it is not based on a new productive paradigm. As in order to de-grow, the economy has to deactivate the inbuilt mechanism that triggers growth. And this implies the deconstruction of the established economic rationality in the global world order and the construction and legitimization of a new sustainable paradigm of production based on the negentropic productivity of ecosystem local economies, and of an environmental rationality based on a culture of diversity, a politics of dif­ference and an ethic of otherness (Leff, 2008).