Research Agenda

Research at CSTM falls under the theme of Innovation and Governance for Sustainable Development, divided into four categories: water governance, energy & climate, sustainable production & consumption, and local & regional sustainability. All these projects contribute to the Institute for Governance Studies (IGS) at the University of Twente, in which CSTM participates.CSTM’s Research is also integrated in the Dutch National Research School “Netherlands Institute of Government”, in which all Dutch universities co-operate.

The concept of sustainability has come to occupy a permanent place on the public and political agenda. The academic community, governments, businesses, and broader society recognise the importance of sustainable development for the future health and welfare of the planet and its inhabitants. Previous research has often focused on separate approaches of business responsibilities and initiatives, government policies, instruments and implementation networks, cultural and value orientations, and technological inventions and advances, to deal with the challenge. But if the scientific study into dealing with the challenge of sustainability since the early nineties has made anything clear, than that is that all these changes are in need of each other. The unavoidable challenge of sustainable development can only be met by their productive co-evolution.

The programme “Innovation and Governance for Sustainable Development” (in brief: “Sustainable Innovation”) seeks to investigate how such co-evolution can be supported by governance approaches based on a deeper understanding of how and when sustainable innovations occur and sometimes even lead to so-called ‘transitions’, like the ones strived for by Dutch government, e.g. in our energy system. Thereby it addresses both the Western challenge of sustainable development, so in the Netherlands and the rest of Europe and OECD countries, and the challenge of sustainability in developing countries, so in a north-south perspective. Theories on policy processes, multi-actor network analysis, multi-level arrangements and interactions, innovation and diffusion, integrated assessment, gender, public participation, property and use rights, policy instruments and other incentive structures, and more, all contribute to the multi-theoretical framework which is adopted for this research.

The programme has four main research themes. The first is ‘innovation in water management’, addressing water policies, governance and dealing with risks and uncertainty. A second is ‘energy and climate change’ in which e.g. the diffusion of renewable energy technologies and energy saving strategies, the analysis of the consequences of new energy market structures in electricity and gas, the requirements and opportunities of the Kyoto protocol, also for developing countries, are studied. A third theme is that of the ‘greening of industry’ (the University of Twente host the coordination centre of this global research network) in which the impact on more sustainable business technologies and practices are studied of corporate social responsibility initiatives and innovative governance approaches. The last theme is local and regional sustainability. Like in the other themes all three ‘pillars’ of sustainable development: economical development (e.g. human capital resources and the innovation capacity of the Twente region), social cohesion (e.g. equity and gender issues) and environmental issues (including spatial quality issues and sustainable tourism) are studied in their mutual context.