On going research

Governing through innovation: assessing the innovation turn in urban policy

Politics and science come to increasingly merge through innovation. Innovation has become pervasive in a wide range of policy domains. In urban policy, innovation constructs the idea of the city as a laboratory, which can include all types of innovation, from technological to social and grassroots innovation, at least as part of the official discourse. My interest in this project is to investigate what the idea of innovation does, and to what extent innovation facilitates urban governance or creates new challenges.

Innovation can be seen as a strategy to deal with complexity: where complex systems may not be easy to govern through existing means, innovation can provide new means of governing at least in the ideal plane. In practice, innovations may work in the restricted domain of cause-effect for which they are designed, but may have the opposite effect when scaled-up and allowed to interact with a broader range of causes and effects, and with policy domains and institutions that work according to differing logics, rationales, values and goals (Kovacic, Rommetveit, and Strand 2020). Interactions between different elements of the system may constrain the effectiveness of innovations or may lead to the emergence of new trade-offs. For this reason, the European Environment Agency has identified technological change as one of the “drivers of change” that forward looking policy needs to take into account (European Environment Agency 2019).

The understanding of innovation as a driver of change may turn “governing through innovation” on its head and create instances in which innovation contributes to the complexity rather than the ordering of things, creating a changing context for governance instead of something to be governed. Innovative approaches that aim at extending citizen participation through information and communication technology (ICT), and the EU mantra of a just transition, could open some space for non-scripted grassroot innovation. March (2018) has argued that a critical engagement with ICT may also offer alternatives to technocratic governance, including post-capitalist and degrowth transitions. In this sense, the question of how innovation impact urban policy has an open-ended nature.