Adrian Smith

University of Sussex · Science Policy Research Unit (SPRU)

To minimize market fragmentation, optimize efficiencies through compatible digital architectures, and encourage collaboration, high-level smart city harmonization efforts have been advocated across Europe. This paper critically analyzes attempts by the European Innovation Partnership for Smart Cities and Communities Six Nations Forum (EIP-SCC 6N) t...

Makerspaces are open community workshops for peer production which provide people with technical tools and training to experiment with making, learning, and hands‐on participation around material cultures. These workshops come in a variety of forms, and they are called by many names, including shared machine shops, hackerspaces, fab labs, digital s...

Digital platforms for urban democracy are analyzed in Madrid and Barcelona. These platforms permit citizens to debate urban issues with other citizens; to propose developments, plans, and policies for city authorities; and to influence how city budgets are spent. Contrasting with neoliberal assumptions about Smart Citizenship, the technopolitics di...

Makerspaces can be a source of human capabilities that benefit people and society. But these capabilities will only lead to flourishing communities if they are accompanied by structural changes to our economies, cities and environment.

The relationship between technology and human capabilities is an ambivalent one. The same technology can expand capabilities for some users under certain circumstances, whilst diminishing capabilities for others situated differently. In this paper we analyse human capabilities in relation to digital design and fabrication technologies as configured...

The rapid global deployment of solar photovoltaic (PV) technologies since the early 2000s has attracted sustained attention. Solar PV has become an increasingly established, widespread and flexible form of electricity generation. In the research language of socio-technical or energy transitions, solar PV can reasonably be viewed as acquiring the ch...

There is a risk in the ‘Smart City’ that plural forms of knowing the city become eclipsed by singular governance-oriented analyses produced through computational logics originating from undemocratic service providers. In light of this concern, this chapter considers three aspects of smart urbanism’s knowledge politics: i) the role of urban agencies...

Brazil is a country where many initiatives connected to making have recently emerged. It is also a country in which poverty and social exclusion are still major problems. Seeking to address these problems, experiments in “social technologies” – artefacts, processes and methods oriented towards promoting social inclusion – have developed in the coun...

Makerspaces are subjects in a plurality of institutional advances and developments, catching the imaginations of a wide variety of organisations and other actors drawn to a buzz of enticing possibilities. Depending upon the nature of the encounter, makerspaces are becoming cradles for entrepreneurship, innovators in education, nodes in open hardwar...

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In this paper we introduce an area of activity that has flourished for decades in all corners of the globe, namely grassroots innovation for sustainable development. We also argue why innovation in general is a matter for democracy. Combining these two points, we explore how grassroots innovation can contribute to what we call innovation democracy,...

L a innovación social requiere de una transformación en las prácticas de la innovación. Estas transformaciones deben ser democráticas. Por lo menos esa es la hipótesis de este artí- culo. Los Makerspaces (espacios de emprendedores) son estudia- dos como posibles sitios de democratización de la actividad. Los Makerspaces son talleres basados en la c...

La historia de los movimientos de innovación de base muestra potencialidades y beneficios para nuevos procesos de innovación y producción de conocimiento: intervenir y cuestionar tecnologías y prácticas existentes, plantear nuevos problemas a las comunidades científicas y tecnológicas y establecer nuevas prioridades para el desarrollo. Este trabajo...

This article provides brief, personal reflections on developments in the research fields of sociotechnical transitions theory and grassroots innovation since publication of the article ‘Alternative technology niches and sustainable developments’. What is striking about work since then is the importance for sustainable development of interaction and...

This paper contrasts two niche-based approaches to sustainable development, both recommended for greening technology systems. One is new, the other is old. In fact, a gap of thirty years separates Strategic Niche Management (SNM) from the Alternative Technology movement (AT), yet both share a niche-based perspective on change. Their core approach i...

Innovation is increasingly invoked by policy elites and business leaders as vital for tackling global challenges like sustainable development. Often overlooked, however, is the fact that networks of community groups, activists, and researchers have been innovating grassroots solutions for social justice and environmental sustainability for decades....

Innovation is increasingly invoked by policy elites and business leaders as vital for tackling global challenges like sustainable development. Often overlooked, however, is the fact that networks of community groups, activists, and researchers have been innovating grassroots solutions for social justice and environmental sustainability for decades....

Ninguna tecnología es neutral. Todas las tecnologías son políticas. Algunas participan activamente en dinámicas de concentración de poder, de apropiación de la riqueza, de generación de riesgos y daños ambientales, de exclusión. Otras, en cambio, favorecen la democratización del poder, la distribución de la riqueza, el acceso abierto y comunitario...

Las impresoras 3D son cada vez más accesibles y pueden revolucionar los mecanis-mos de producción, consumo y comercio. El diseño a medida del usuario modifi-ca las perspectivas del transporte de mercancías, almacenamiento y fabricación a gran escala. ¿En qué consisten los fablabs y la cultura del " hazlo tú mismo " ? ¿Cómo garantizar que los cambio...

Grassroots innovations for sustainability are attracting increasing policy attention. Drawing upon a wide range of empirical research into community energy in the UK, and taking recent support from national government as a case study, we apply three distinct analytical perspectives: strategic niche management, niche policy advocacy, and critical ni...

Energy systems around the globe face multiple, major pressures to transform into more sustainable ones. Over the past decades numerous, potentially sustainable energy innovations have been proposed, studied, developed and implemented to varying degrees. In the field of transition studies, scholars have used the notion of 'protective space' to study...

It is widely acknowledged that many renewable energy technologies cannot (yet) compete with incumbent (fossil fuel) options e.g. in terms of price. Transitions literature argues that sustainable innovations can nevertheless break out of their ‘niches’ if properly shielded, nurtured and empowered. Most studies using this perspective have focused on...

In February 2015, city authorities in São Paulo announced plans to open a network of 12 public FabLabs. Following in the wake of an earlier 'telecentro' initiative that opened up internet access and digital media to citizens, the FabLabs are meant to bring the tools of digital fabrication to the people, equipping them for a fuller role in what FabL...

In the sustainability transitions literature the idea of ‘protective space’ shielding niche innovations from unfriendly selection environments is a fundamental concept. Few studies pause to consider how and by whom such protective space is created, maintained or expanded. The paper develops three propositions to deepen our understanding of the ‘out...

System-changing innovations for sustainability transitions are proposed to emerge in radical innovative niches. ‘Strategic Niche Management’ theory predicts that niche-level actors and networks will aggregate learning from local projects, disseminating best practice, and encouraging innovation diffusion. Grassroots innovations emerging from civil s...

Though largely forgotten now, Technology Networks were community-based prototyping workshops supported by the Greater London Council from 1983 until 1986. They emerged out of a movement for socially useful production. Recalling the radical roots and conflicted experiences of the workshops brings to the fore issues still relevant today: tensions bet...

Grassroots innovation movements (GIMs) can be regarded as initiators or advocates of alternative pathways of innovation. Sometimes these movements engage with more established science, technology and innovation (STI) institutions and development agencies in pursuit of their goals. In this paper, we argue that an important aspect to encounters betwe...

UK is world leader in offshore wind deployment. Article explains boom in deployment by looking at the politics of renewable energy policy. Offshore wind is supported by a variety of actors with aligned political and economic interests. Analysis highlights the importance of a system builder. a b s t r a c t Offshore wind technology has recently unde...

STEPS Grassroots Innovation project NOTE: A new article on grassroots innovation has just been published on the website of the Journal of Cleaner Production, authored by The Honey Bee Network has issued a Declaration for grassroots innovation. It draws upon a quarter century of experience in the field, and the Network's increasing profile and influ...

"Technology-focused literature on socio-technical transitions shares some of the complex systems sensibilities of social-ecological systems research. We contend that the sharing of lessons between these areas of study must attend particularly to the common governance challenges that confront both approaches. Here, we focus on critical experience ar...

A history and analysis is provided of the movement for socially useful production, which flourished for a brief period in the UK in the 1970s and 1980s. Swimming against the rising tide of neo-liberalism, activists provided both a critique of the existing institutions for innovation in society, and developed a set of practical initiatives that expl...

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The ability of innovation—both technical and social—to stretch and redefine 'limits to growth' was recognised at Stockholm in 1972, and has been a key feature in debates through to Rio+20 in 2012. Compared with previous major moments of global reflection about human and planetary futures—Stockholm, Rio in 1992, Johannesburg in 2002—we now have a be...

Community energy projects are attracting increasing attention as potential sources of innovation to support sustainable energy transitions. Research into ‘grassroots innovations’ like community energy often recognises the difficulties they face in simply surviving let alone in growing or seeding wider change. Strategic niche management theory is po...

The community-led sustainable energy sector is diverse, and growing in the UK. Sometimes it is more about the community than the energy. Joined-up policy thinking is needed to properly measure performance and impact. There are limits to how much civil society-led groups can achieve on their own. Consistent policy support is essential to the sector'...

Over the coming decades the Highlands and Islands of Scotland will be transformed as new technologies and infrastructures are installed to exploit wind, wave, and tide power. However, interactions between the region-understood as a sociospatial category shaped by history, culture, and institutions-and these technologies are poorly understood and ne...

This paper engages with recent research concerning the roles of niche spaces in the strategic management of sustainable innovations. Whilst a growing body of empirical investigation looks to developments within these spaces, it is surprising how little pauses to consider how the spaces themselves develop over time, what constitutes these spaces, an...

a b s t r a c t Technologies for social inclusion in Latin America are a recent manifestation of grassroots innovation movements whose global activities go back to appropriate technology in the 1970s and earlier. Common to these movements is a vision for innovation processes more inclusive towards local communities in terms of knowledge, processes...

a b s t r a c t This paper reviews the developments of solar photovoltaic (PV) technology in The Netherlands. Despite the recent boom in PV industries and its global deployment, The Netherlands has up to now not experienced major growth in the diffusion of PV electricity generation. But this is only part of the story. This paper focuses on the ques...

The urgency of charting pathways to sustainability that keep human societies within a "safe operating space" has now been clarified. Crises in climate, food, biodiversity, and energy are already playing out across local and global scales and are set to increase as we approach critical thresholds. Drawing together recent work from the Stockholm Resi...

The international harmonization of technology-related regulations seeks certain norms across diverse contexts. Harmonization efforts are based primarily on the promulgation of state-centered command and control forms of regulation, though they may also be accompanied by the diffusion of more plural approaches that are decentered from the state. We...

Technology-focused literature on socio-technical transitions shares some of the complex systems sensibilities of social-ecological systems research. We contend that the sharing of lessons between these areas of study must attend particularly to the common governance challenges that confront both approaches. Here, we focus on critical experience ari...

Sustainable development is prompting a re-assessment of innovation and technological change. This review paper contributes three things towards this re-assessment activity. First, it considers how the history of innovation studies for sustainable development can be explained as a process of linking broader analytical frameworks to successively larg...

In this article we explore some of the analytical and policy implications of widening the focus of nanomaterials governance from risk regulation to the broader issue of the purposeful direction of the innovation process. We focus on the impact of industrial activities on nanotechnology governance, arguing that the specific characteristics of the in...

Long-term policy is enjoying something of a come-back in connection with sustainable development. The current revival tries to avoid the pitfalls of an earlier generation of positivistic long-range planning and control approaches. Instead, this new generation of policy design emphasises reflexive governance concepts. These aim at inducing and navig...

Whilst not originating in political analysis, a transitions problem framing nevertheless provides a heuristic for understanding certain features of climate politics. A multi-level perspective on transitions to low carbon socio-technical regimes is introduced, and illustrated through the example of electricity supply. An associated ‘transition manag...

In this article we explore the analytical and policy implications of widening the governance of nanomaterials from the focus on risk regulation to a broader focus on the governance of innovation. To do this, we have analysed the impact of industrial activities on nanotechnology governance, while previous studies have concentrated on risk appraisal,...