Green Policy Innovations Idea Lab

Environmental problems currently pose enormous challenges and opportunities for the United States and the world. The Green Policy Innovation Ideas Lab is a multi-disciplinary center of cutting edge graduate student work at the nexus of environmental problem-solving and emerging technologies. Graduate student participants draw from sociology, business and management studies, law, organizational studies, political science, anthropology, city and regional planning, public policy and environmental policy analysis to apply perspectives from social science disciplines to important debates about green innovation.

Our idea lab is essential because effective deployment of green innovation ultimately requires not just technical sciences, but also tools from the social sciences. Consider the stabilization wedges, the now popular schematic developed by Pacala and Socolow (2004). While this approach offers an important rubric for understanding technological pathways to climate change mitigation, it does not sufficiently account for how socio-political systems1 influence technological adoption and use. Technological advances clearly have a role to play in addressing some of the world’s most critical problems, like the development and scaling of energy alternatives and the provision of clean water. Innovations in social and political systems, however, are equally essential to address pressing environmental and energy challenges.

The Green Policy Innovation Ideas Lab brings together graduate students from across campus who develop policy solutions to catalyze green innovation. The participating graduate students enhance their own research activities through comparison across themes, methods, disciplines, and cases. In particular, students of this Ideas Lab are interested in infusing major policy debates and technical discussions about green innovation with social science perspectives. For example, how does centralization encourage and inhibit development of alternative energy systems? What mechanisms exist to enhance democratic deliberation about the future of natural resources? What issues and interests have been obfuscated by major policy rubrics promoting green innovation? How are private and state-led industrial research and development programs for green innovation materializing and what ‘lessons learned’ are relevant? What are best practices in green innovation? What groups are marginalized in major policy discussions about green innovation? How are green technologies spurring policy innovations and procedures? These questions require our multi-disciplinary social science lenses to examine environmental and technical policies of the past and present in their full socio-political context.


Main Contact: Avery Cohn