| Since the 1970s, growing societal concerns on ecological problems and other side effects of traditional modernisation processes have put traditional, classical-modernist institutions of government, the market, science and civil society (as well as their mutual alignment) under increasing pressure. For instance, in the agricultural domain, the Iron Triangle of parliamentary agricultural specialists, the Ministry and farmers organizations has yielded much of its previously large influence to a wide variety of policy arrangements of different kinds, e.g. (Wisserhof, 2000): New statist[L.4] arrangements, focusing on the development of ecological and legal expertise and legislative power though traditional mechanisms, with government playing a central, sovereign role; Market-conform arrangements, using knowledge and technology development, and the development of standards, on the basis of self-regulation; Civic policy arrangements, using knowledge and information, as well as of managerial and communicative skills, on the basis of co-operative, public-private modes of working. In addition, globalisation (such as the WTO regime) and Europeanisation have influenced, in a similar way, the multilevel government arrangements at the EU and the national level, as well as the arrangements in between them (Hennis, 2000). [L.5] According to a variety of authors (Alexander, 1995; Kumar, 1995; Van Tatenhove et al., 2000), this process of political modernisation must be seen as closely interacting with the substantive changes in policies. The relations between the two can, at a higher level, been seen as an expression of the duality of structure. One aspect of that is, that these new arrangements may be seen as a process of ongoing institutionalisation of environmental policies (Van Tatenhove, 2000). Seen that way, one might expect that these arrangements may promote and facilitate[L.6] system innovations, as intermediaries in between classical-modernist institutions. In fact, some of them are explicitly the results of earlier attempts at system innovations. Simultaneously, another aspect of this co-evolution is that classical modernist institutions and the routines, rules, roles and assumptions embedded in them have far from disappeared; and the current diversity of the institutional landscape leads to interferences that in many cases imply important barriers and difficulties for attempts at system innovations (Boonstra, 2004; Grin et al. 2004a,b). This side of the coin focuses our attention to the fact that these intermediaries cannot be just seen as new alignments between institutional realms, but, rather, must be seen as engaged in the process the struggle of re-aligning them.[L.7] (Sterrenberg & Rutten, 2001) The objectives of this project are to describe this process of co-evolution and to understand [L.8]the implications of this process in terms of problems and opportunities for system innovation. It will analyse projects for system innovation in a variety of these arrangements, and in relation to the ongoing co-evolution of policies and the institutional landscape. More specifically, it will be focusing on three aspects: impacts of projects for system innovation; modes of knowledge generation; democratic accountability. As we depart from the assumption that such projects are essentially political in nature involving normative choices, strategic action and confrontation with power implied in institutions we will investigate these aspects as resulting from interactions and interferences between these projects and the problems and opportunities implied in their (evolving) environment. |
