Modulation of Sociotechnical Change as Climate Change Challange

Abstract

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This report summarizes the findings of the MATRIC-project. Matric stands for 'Management of Technology Responses to the Climate Change Challenge'. The project empirically studied technological change and innovation to learn more about the contigencies conditioning and influencing these processes with the aim to recommend national technology oriented climate change policies. The social construction of technology implies that processes of technological change are guided by dynamics of their own, which follow from the way technology becomes embedded in society. Why and how technology changes is therefore not only decided by technological artefacts, new ideas about artefacts and the succes of R&D as the linear models assume, but in fact results from the dynamic interation between technologies and societal environment in which they operate. How and why innovations adapt is basically influenced by a contigent set of selection mechanisms operating in the social environment of technology. The influence of the societal environment of technological change and innovation turns out to be much more dexisive and significant than is assumed by linear models of innovation. This fundamental idea of social embeddedness of technology has been the analytical point of departure of Matric project.