Innovation For Sustainability: African and European Perspectives

Introduction

ix Introduction Mammo Muchie We live in a world where there is a growing threat to nature that can eventually lead to a bigger threat to human well-being if there is failure to respond to all the warning signals. The innovation system theory has to deals with climate change as it generates the intellectual tools to promote development . A unified innovation system theory that integrates the eradication of threats to nature with the promotion of development is critically important to advance an original pedigree and trajectory of epistemology. Africa must learn and appreciate the costs to itself from the way Europe industrialised. It can neither follow and/or imitate the European pattern of industrialisation . It has to include in its own development agenda both meeting social needs and choosing a path of development that would not bring ecological harm in the process. The African innovation system has to evolve in a nature protecting – rather than hurting – system; in addition, social needs must be met rather than exacerbating the social inequalities path of development. Given the pressures of navigating in a globalised world economy from a weaker position in the international division of labour, this is not an easy task. There has been an acknowledgement that the way industrialisation took off both in the earlier industrialised and newly industrialised economies, was by exploiting and injuring nature. Human induced climate change is one of the results of the specific path industrialisation has taken. Economic development has continued to this day being mainly driven as a process that is both polluting and energy intensive. The reports from the International Convention on Climate Change identify growing GDP as the main sources of carbon emission. A nature nurturing rather than hurting path of economic development has not been created yet. The dilemma is that there is a need for a shared responsibility by all, to protect nature, and a desire by each nation in the world not to be deprived from the right to grow and develop, as the major northern economies have done. The problem of winning those who wish to develop yet to share responsibility for nature, and those who have already industrialised to share responsibility for both nature protection and poverty eradication simultaneously, has been difficult to realise in practice, though it has been easier to state it in words. About 20 per cent of the world’s population live in the industrialised North and occupy about 80 per cent of the world environment and economic space. Governments have to acknowledge that their contribution to carbon x INTRODUCTION emission is not the same and that therefore the financial burden cannot be shared equally. The ongoing economic crisis seems to create a renewed challenge to deal with both poverty and climate change as a priority. Many nations are now concerned with getting their economies on track. Naturally, economic growth and reducing emissions are two different priorities in public policy. Aid to reduce poverty will be cut as carbon emission targets too. Both are at the bottom of the political agendas, as coming out of the economic downturn comes first. For their part, developing countries prioritize growth and poverty reduction with more urgency than climate change and reducing carbon emissions. Implementing a shared and differentiated responsibility when states follow different interests will not be easy. Shared responsibility for the planet can only mean differentiated responsibility . It is shared because all humanity is responsible to nurture and not torture nature. But the way history evolved shows uneven economic , social and political distributions and inequalities where the torture of nature and people took place. What this means is that it is fair to suggest within the shared responsibility that those who benefited but got away with contributing to climate change need to contribute more than those who did not spoil nature. There is a historical difference in the way industrialised and industrialising countries contributed to climate change. Such important differences bring differentiated responsibility to achieve shared responsibility. One area that can be utilized to bring the divergent interests to converge is finding an agreed application of science, technology, engineering and innovation. Technological innovation and diffusion may be part of the solution. Technologies to mitigate emissions are mostly available in the industrialised countries. In the developing worlds, climate change impacts are mostly agricultural, and despite the mitigation, adaptation technologies are in high demand. The other part of the solution is a shared and comprehensive division of the costs of these technologies. For...