Innovation for sustainability: policies, methods and approaches to drive societal outcomes

Constructive multi-sectoral collaborations are an essential driver of the transition to a safe climate and an equitable future. From agriculture to energy, and biodiversity to community resilience, Australia is currently working towards improved societal outcomes on many fronts. CSIRO’s Valuing Sustainability Future Science Platform (VS FSP) has a key role to play in building the next generation science to support those efforts. 

The Valuing Sustainability FSP has recently launched a new series of online public seminars to highlight their sustainability science research agenda and to showcase collaborations with industry, government and civil society.

The series kicked off in early December with a well-attended session on innovation for sustainability. The main focus was on innovation within Australia’s agriculture and food systems, but the session also encompassed broader themes and explored questions that are important to consider in every sector. How can we embed innovation within broader systems? How can we shift innovation narratives to help direct innovation towards sustainability goals? And how can we track if innovation narratives, and the practices these support, are changing? The session was recorded with the recording now available.

“Our remit is to develop new and credible measures and indicators of sustainability,” said Dr Peat Leith, Director of the VS FSP.

“We want to ensure that such measures can drive sustainability outcomes through investment and innovation – and we treat this itself as a research question. It’s not just about the what and the why – it’s about how we drive innovation for sustainability. How do we connect with decision contexts and draw on diverse relevant knowledge and perspectives to build solutions that are legitimate, trusted, workable and wanted.”

Meeting new challenges 

Over the last century, Australia’s agricultural sector has moved through several distinct phases of development, each with an overarching goal of economic efficiency.

Those phases have included an early focus on infrastructure and transport networks to expand agriculture into new areas; and a post-war focus on intensification to increase productivity, including through innovative technologies such as plant breeding and mechanization.

Dr Rohan Nelson is an agricultural economist with the Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics (ABARES), currently on secondment to CSIRO where he is the Director of Food System Horizons. He believes that while our existing agrifood innovation system is still fit for the purposes it was designed for – meeting economic goals via market-driven solutions – we are now confronted by non-market challenges like sustainability that require a fresh approach.

“Australia has a world class system of Rural Research and Development Corporations that efficiently invest in commodity-specific, productivity-enhancing research and development – and we absolutely need them to keep doing that,” he said.

“The problem is that we’re facing increasingly more complex problems that are either caused by the failure of the markets in which we’re trying to resolve the problems, or they’re simply beyond the capability of the markets to resolve. We need to keep meeting economic goals while complementing our innovation system with new functions to meet those challenges.”

One approach that Dr Nelson believes researchers can take to support a major policy transition is by creating safe spaces for policy makers to discuss, evaluate and co-design options for managing the emerging sustainability and social challenges.

Another is to help policy makers reframe problems and approach them in a more evidence-based, forward-looking and multidimensional manner.

“It’s really important to recognise the work that tenacious policy colleagues have been doing for decades, often in quite challenging institutional situations,” said Dr Nelson. “We’re not looking to replace that; we’re looking to build on it. We already have hundreds of locally rational and highly efficient but highly specialised innovation silos. What we need to facilitate now is better coordination across those silos, because the complex human, social and technical effort required to address sustainability challenges is likely to require an extraordinary degree of public coordination.”

Doing innovation differently

CSIRO Senior Principal Research Scientist Dr Andy Hall agrees that Australia’s Rural Research and Development Corporations, established in 1989, have been highly effective and successful vehicles for co-ordinating co-investment by the agricultural industry and government, developing technology and driving productivity.

But like Dr Nelson he expressed concerned that the challenges facing the agricultural sector have now expanded beyond their capacity to manage.

“The impact agenda is changing,” said Dr Hall. “It’s a much broader set of challenges which are not at the farm scale, they’re at societal scale. We are facing issues to do with food, healthy and sustainable diets, the climate crisis, drought, bushfires and all kinds of changing weather patterns that are impacting productivity and the food system more broadly.”

Dr Hall argued that three key things are required to build policy options for innovation that can better support sustainability transitions in Australia’s agriculture and food sectors.

“Firstly, we need innovations in innovation,” said Dr Hall. “I know that’s a bit of tongue twister – but what it means is that we need to do innovation differently for sustainability.”

“Within agriculture, the innovation landscape is very complex,” he continued. “We’re seeing grassroots innovation, social innovation, business model innovation, and whole-of-system transformative innovation. Then we are also seeing changes in values and preferences among consumers and markets. Taken together, that means we have to look through a much broader lens than we are used to. There’s a whole agenda around innovation which goes well beyond technology.”

Dr Hall has recently published research in Nature reviewing a range of technologies and exploring which would be most likely to drive sustainability. The paper concluded that the value for sustainability was not inherent in the technologies themselves, but in how the system directed those technologies to different ends.

“There are always choices within the system about how technology is put to different uses,” he said. “But this piece of work also told us you need to construct a system of use to drive those technologies towards sustainability. You need to build social licence; you need regulation and policy incentives; you need to design market incentives; and you need to build trust.”

According to Dr Hall, two other key aspects for driving innovation for sustainability are challenging inertia in innovation policy, and changing innovation narratives that reinforce this policy inertia.

“Our current innovation narratives are what frame innovation policy, investment options and performance criteria,” Dr Hall explained. “The problem is that they give legitimacy to only a narrow set of options, and don’t leave room for other innovation approaches. We need to broaden our narratives to include other perspectives – not just agricultural industries and government, but communities, consumers and civil society organisations too – and use those to develop our own uniquely Australian innovation narrative that reflects societies social economic and sustainability aspirations.”

Tracking changes in innovation narratives

Narratives were also the key focus for the third speaker in the online seminar, Dr Shima Khanehzar, a CSIRO postdoctoral researcher who uses computational linguistics and natural language processing techniques to track and trace changes in innovation narratives within a variety of settings.

“In our data driven era, the ability to efficiently analyse large volumes of text is not just beneficial, it’s actually essential,” explained Dr Khanehzar. “This is particularly true in a field like sustainability, where the discourses are each evolving and are critical to shaping policy and public perceptions. Language is not just a medium of communication, it’s a powerful tool that shapes our perceptions, policies and actions on sustainability.”

Dr Khanehzar discussed how computational linguistics can be a powerful tool in detecting and understanding the narratives that drive innovation. By analysing large datasets of textual information from a diverse range of sources – including academic papers, organisational and policy documents, and even social media posts – researchers can uncover patterns and explore how discussions around innovation for sustainability have changed over time.

One key example Dr Khanehzar presented is the difference between technocentric narratives, which focus on the capabilities and potential of technology itself, and network-centric narratives, where the focus shifts from the technology in isolation to emphasis the interaction of the technology with social, economic and political elements.

“There’s enormous value in detecting and tracking these narratives of innovation for sustainability,” concluded Dr Khanehzar. “It offers insights for policy development to enhance the effectiveness of sustainable practices. It enables organisations to align their innovation strategies with sustainability goals and provide a deeper understanding of communication patterns to refine future strategies. And it allows us to develop versatile tools and analytic methods that can be applicable across a wide range of domains.”

Author – Ruth Dawkins