Environmental technological change and governance in sustainable development policy

An evolutionary economics perspective between technological innovation and public policy is applied to analyse the relationships between technological change, sustainable development and industrial competitiveness. This leads us to emphasise the fundamental role that firm's strategies vis-a-vis the endogenisation of technological change can play for giving effect to 'win-win' strategies. However, allowing industrial competition to become the only factor determining 'win-win' strategies could lead to 'locked' technological and social options being chosen which do not contribute to overall goals of ecological, social and economic sustainability. For this reason we introduce, as complements to competitiveness, the requirement of new forms of governance in pursuit of ecological-economic sustainability. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.