Mario Pansera

Available open access digitally under CC-BY-NC-ND licence. Post growth and degrowth scholars argue that we cannot reduce CO2 emissions fast enough to keep global warming below 2 degrees while continuing economic growth. We face a choice: either we innovate how to scale down production and consumption equitably, or we risk severe environmental and social consequences. Yet the role of innovation remains largely unexplored within contemporary post growth debates. This book fills that gap, examining the narratives, processes and practices needed to break free from the growth imperative. It offers a bridge for understanding the far-reaching implications of technological and scientific advancements in a society that challenges economic growth as its central focus.

Critically assessing growth-based models of innovation policy, this enlightening study sparks new debate on the role and nature of responsible innovation. Drawing on insights from economics, politics, and science and technology studies, it proposes the concept of 'responsible stagnation' as an expansion of present discussions about growth, degrowth, responsibility and innovation within planetary limitations. This important intervention explores real-world relationships between the political economy, innovation policy and concepts of responsibility, and will be an invaluable resource for individuals and civil society organizations who seek to promote responsible innovation.

Innovation, often tempered by the language of inclusion, has become an indispensable element of contemporary development policy and practice in the so-called Global South. Driven by multinational companies, public–private partnerships and social enterprises, “innovation for development” aims to co-produce social goods (things of value) such as poverty alleviation with associated profit through innovative market-led solutions, opening up untapped and unserved markets in the developing world and exploiting the potential “fortune at the bottom of the pyramid”. But innovation for development is a contested notion with the capacity to shelter multiple political agendas. By reviewing existing academic theory and discussing four in-depth case studies from Bangladesh and India, this book interrogates how innovation for development is being framed, its politics and the impacts it is having on rural communities on the ground. The analysis suggests both an emerging hegemony constructed around a neoliberal, market-led agenda and the existence of countervailing voices that question this framing, sometimes radically so.