Description
Book SynopsisThe central questions of this book are how technologies decline, how societies deal with technologies in decline, and how governance may be explicitly oriented towards parting with undesirable' technology.
Surprisingly, these questions are fairly novel. Thus far, the dominant interest in historical, economic, sociological and political studies of technology has been to understand how novelty emerges, how innovation can open up new opportunities and how such processes may be supported. This innovation bias reflects how in the last centuries modern societies have embraced technology as a vehicle of progress. It is timely, however, to broaden the social study of technology and society: next to considering the rise of technologies, their fall should be addressed, too. Dealing with technologies in decline is an important challenge or our times, as socio-technical systems are increasingly part of the problems of climate change, biodiversity loss, social inequalities and geo-politica
Table of Contents
1 Introduction: The relevance of technologies in decline; 2 Dynamics of technological decline as socio-material unravelling; 3 Destabilisation, decline and phase-out in transitions research; 4 Conceptual aspects of discontinuation governance: An exploration; 5 Discourses around decline: Comparing the debates on coal phase-out in the UK, Germany and Finland; 6 Mapping the territorial adaptation of technological trajectories: The phase-out of the internal combustion engine; 7 The role of alternative technologies in the enactment of (dis)continuities; 8 Caring for decline: The case of 16mm film artworks of Tacita Dean; 9 Implementing exnovation?: Exnovation ambitions and governance complexity in the case of the Brussels Low Emission Zone; 10 Phase-out as a policy approach to address sustainability challenges: A systematic review; 11 The end of the world’s leaded petrol era: Reflections on the final four decades of a century-long campaign; 12 Conclusions and continuations: Horizons for studying technologies in decline
