Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
technology
rms. Especially in sectors with an important public or collective involvement,
such as transportation, construction and agriculture, this means that intelligent govern-
ment policies are required to bring about necessary change.
Rigid industries whose processes have remained stagnant also face considerable
fi
di
cantly more sustainable. Shifts from products to 'product
services' rely on changes in the use, location and ownership of products in which mature
product manufacturers may participate, but this requires signi
culties in becoming signi
fi
cant changes involving
both managerial and social (customer) innovations. Changes in socio-technical 'systems',
such as transportation or agriculture, are even more di
fi
cult. This suggests that the
creative use of government intervention is a more promising strategic approach for
achieving sustainable industrial transformations than the reliance of the more neoliberal
policies on
rms' shorter-term economic self-interest.
This is not to say that enhanced analytic and technical capabilities on the part of
fi
fi
rms,
cooperative e
orts and improved communication with suppliers, customers, workers,
other industries and environmental/consumer/community groups are not valuable
adjuncts in the transformation process. But in most cases these means and strategies are
unlikely to be su
ff
cant transformations, and they will not
work without clear mandated targets to enhance the triple goals of competitiveness, envi-
ronmental quality and enhancement of employment/labor concerns.
Government has a signi
cient by themselves for signi
fi
cant role to play, but the government cannot simply serve as a
referee or arbiter of existing competing interests, because neither future generations nor
future technologies are adequately represented by the existing stakeholders. Government
should work with stakeholders to de
fi
ne far-future targets - but without allowing the
agenda to be captured by the incumbents - and then use its position as trustee to repre-
sent the future generations and the future technologies to 'backcast' what speci
fi
c policies
are necessary to produce the required technical, organizational and social transforma-
tions. As mentioned earlier, this backcasting will have to be of a next-generation variety
of backcasting. It has to go beyond its historical focus on coordinating public and private
sector policies. It must be multidimensional and directly address the present fragmenta-
tion of governmental functions - not only at the national level, but also at the regional
level in closely allied nations such as those in the EU, and at the international level through
multilateral environmental and labor agreements and within revised trade regimes such as
the WTO and NAFTA.
There is a great deal of serendipity and uncertainty in the industrial transformation
process, and the long-term prospects may not be su
fi
nable to suggest obvious
pathways or trajectories for the needed transformations. Thus it may be unreasonable to
expect that government can play too de
ciently de
fi
nitive a 'futures-making' role. What follows from
this is that rather than attempting tight management of the pathways for the transforma-
tions that are sustainable in the broad sense in which we de
fi
ne it in this chapter, the gov-
ernment role might be better conceived as one of 'enabling' or 'facilitating' change, while
at the same time lending visionary leadership for co-optimizing competitiveness, envi-
ronment and employment. This means that the various policies must be mutually rein-
forcing. This newly conceptualized leadership role, focused on 'opening up the problem
space of the engineer/designer', is likely to require participation of more than one min-
istry and more than one division of the industrial
fi
rm, with the assistance of profession-
als trained in a more multidisciplinary way (see Ashford, 2004).
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