Stakeholder engagement and collaboration in STI for the green transition

Key messages

• Stakeholder engagement and collaboration in science, technology, and innovation (STI) systems – where governments, industry, civil society, and research institutions jointly set agendas, plan, coordinate and execute actions – has been fine-tuned over decades to maximise STI’s impacts on technological progress, productivity, and growth. However, with the STI system now responding to a broader, more complex array of objectives in the green transition, these collaborative governance models need to adapt.

• Policy experimentation in the governance of STI collaborations can address barriers that limit STI’s role in the green transition, particularly by improving effective engagement between industry and government, supporting interdisciplinary research, and establishing credible channels to engage citizens and integrate their reflections into STI.

• Experimentation is crucial to trying out new practices in STI policies for transition. Research programmes are institutionalising interdisciplinary collaboration, and public consultations are expanding. Learning from these efforts will be essential to turning individual experiments into a more systemic approach to STI “collaborative” governance.

• While multiple experiments on “collaborative” governance are in progress, most remain at a small scale, and are yet to be integrated into mainstream STI policies or implemented at a larger scale. Going forward, it will be important to learn from these experiments and, where possible, use them to inform a more systemic approach to governance of STI partnerships and collaboration.

The need for new policy approaches to STI multistakeholder engagement and collaboration

The institutions that govern science, technology, and innovation (STI) systems across the OECD have well-defined responsibilities and needs, and the governance of these systems is generally mature. The governance of stakeholders engagement and collaboration in STI processes refers to how different stakeholders are managed and coordinated, to the formulation of strategies and allocation of resources across the public and private research communities and the establishment of channels and platforms for collaboration of government, industry, civil society and research. It is this portfolio of responsibilities that continues to enable research and science to underpin the innovation necessary for economic growth, productivity, and well-being.

Nowadays STI systems and institutions are being asked to contribute to a much wider array of objectives: competitiveness, resilience to shocks, accelerating the digital and green transitions, mitigating climate change, and protecting the environment and biodiversity. This creates new demands on the governance of STI engagement and collaboration in the following ways:

• There is a significant need for cross-sectoral and interdisciplinary collaboration, as well as for accelerating the development and diffusion of green technologies for which demand remains underdeveloped. New connections need to be established between research and industry, within countries, and between them to develop radically different innovations for the green transition.

• The public-private governance structures that have supported the type of gradual, incremental innovation within industry are not necessarily those that will enable the scaling of production and diffusion of disruptive technologies. There is only so much that government can do alone, and the realisation of strategic policy objectives will in large part rest on the contribution of industry and the research ecosystems that support them.

• At the same time, government plays a critical role in orchestrating a vision for socio-economic objectives to be achieved and the role of STI therein, such as choices over the speed at which renewable energy goals are to be pursued. This orchestration also extends to aligning diverse public and private stakeholders in jointly working towards realising those objectives.

• The distributional and behavioural implications of the green transition – that is, the implications for changes in how we live, work and travel and the technological adoption requirements of doing so – raise the importance of citizen engagement. The ability of technological and organisational innovations to drive positive change will also depend on those innovations being used and accepted by the people affected by them.

What governance models of STI’s multistakeholder collaboration require experimentation?

The challenges facing STI systems in transition underscore the need for revisiting governance models for stakeholders’ engagement and collaboration in two key areas, each focussing on replacing rigidity with flexibility and silos with collaboration:

• Directed collaboration between industry, research, and government for transition objectives. Facilitating broader collaboration between different STI stakeholders in targeted technology areas comes with increased coordination costs. Cross-sectoral and interdisciplinary approaches are particularly challenging due to much weaker network connections. Moreover, a major challenge for policymakers is to provide a collective vision for stakeholders to collaborate despite diverse – and at times diverging – incentives and perspectives.

Public engagement. Engaging citizens in STI consultations is difficult in practice. STI can often be seen by outsiders as being the purview of experts, disconnected from people’s everyday lives and concerns – in contrast, for example, to education or health issues. A multiplication of consultation exercises over different policy domains can lead to a certain fatigue, discouraging further engagement at a time when a plurality of voices and experiences is essential. A greater number and diversity of voices can also create additional administrative and governance challenges for what are already complex STI policy processes and, without effective moderation and design, discussions risk becoming polarised.

Experimenting in STI governance for collaboration: insights and selected examples

The need for broader industry-research-public collaboration and public engagement are not sufficiently addressed by traditional STI governance structures. Recognising the complexities facing STI systems in responding to the green transition, many governments across the OECD have implemented experiments to improve the coherence and flexibility of STI governance (Arnold et al., 2023[1]).

New modes of coordination for industry-science collaboration in the green transition

Governments regularly articulate strategies for their technology and industrial objectives, the realisation of which increasingly necessitates the mobilisation of STI resources within and between industries. Across the OECD, policymakers are trying to balance direction with new incentives and framework conditions – whether infrastructure, regulation, or demand-side policies – that can encourage industries and their STI ecosystems to push or pull in certain directions. This is less about being prescriptive about what and how industries should innovate, but rather encouraging industries to buy in to a socio-economic vision that emerges from a civic rather than purely market-determined impetus: setting the tone for innovation without crowding out bottom-up initiative.

This type of thinking is clear in government ecosystem approaches to critical technologies, where a commitment to invest in supportive infrastructure and framework conditions for commercialisation can give industry confidence to pursue a certain direction. Take, for example, the European Battery Alliance (EBA), which aims to create a competitive and sustainable battery industry in Europe by fostering collaboration across the entire supply chain from raw materials to manufacturing and recycling. Industrial alliances are not new, but mobilising industry to invest – and de-risk those investments with public finance – in completely new innovative and technological capacities for future competitiveness is.

This type of institutionalised collaboration is also being used in the context of emergent low-carbon fuels and technologies, such as Chile’s Green H2 Incubator and the Hydrogen-Methanol Ship Propulsion, financed by the European Commission Horizon 2020 – the EU’s flagship EUR 80 billion science and innovation programme that ran from 2014-2020. Both initiatives are indicative of efforts by policymakers to bring industrial stakeholders together to push the frontier in green innovation without dictating exactly how such should be achieved. It recognises that industrial buy-in and the mobilisation of industrial STI resources is critical to a wide range of socially determined and strategic policy objectives.

The development of infrastructure is an important component of lowering the barriers to firms contributing to STI for the green transition, both physical – testing centres, laboratories, logistics, etc. – and digital. The types of infrastructure, and their proximity and interaction with different sectors and industries is changing in the context of the green transition. See, for example, the GreenLab industrial and research cluster in Denmark, which focusses on accelerating innovation in green energy, storage, and transportation, and which has succeeded in bringing together industry, academia and policy to co-create solutions. Finland’s SUBSINCO – a co-creation research and commercialisation project implemented by industry, research and Finland’s business development agency, Business Finland – has a similar approach to supporting innovation for fossil fuel-based derivative products, such as packaging and adhesives.

What is new, from an STI governance perspective, is the complexity of addressing the explicit need for multi-disciplinary collaboration for green innovation, and to ensure that STI governance facilitates and encourages new stakeholders to collaborate and co-create. This means ensuring that the policies and structures put in place – whether strategies or physical infrastructure – to foster collaboration are more inclusive, that the policy failures that have prevented broader collaboration from happening previously are addressed, and that policymakers are equipped to deal with the additional coordination complexity that this may engender.

More effective and inclusive citizen engagement in STI

The OECD Agenda for Transformative Science, Technology, and Innovation Policies (Transformative Agenda) includes citizen engagement as an area where change is needed to improve the fitness of STI systems and policy to contribute to societal goals (OECD, 2024[2]). This is supplemented by dedicated policy guidance and concrete recommendations on adapting societal engagement approaches to achieve goals like sustainability transitions. The Transformative Agenda includes the full spectrum of activities associated with society-STI engagement, from public communication to participation in research and innovation and STI policy. With respect to participation, several key actions are emphasised, including prioritising high-value engagement opportunities; aligning approaches with the needs of participatory processes; and institutionalising equity, diversity and inclusion as a core element of participation.

Prioritising quality over quantity is essential when it comes to citizen engagement in STI in practice (Paunov and Planes-Satorra, 2023[3]). Policymakers should focus on organising a limited number of well-designed and impactful engagement processes, rather than creating numerous superficial initiatives that merely serve as a “tick-the-box” formality. Such an approach risks disappointing participants and fostering mistrust in government.

Engagement is most useful when there are policy decisions that require societal endorsement, involving trade-offs with short-term costs for long-term benefits; when policies rely on local community insights, as citizens understand local challenges and can inform innovation efforts; and when addressing polarising issues of deep concern that risk creating or aggravating societal divides. The need to address public apprehensions around the distributional impacts of industrial transitions, AI, and robotics are particularly relevant here.

Initiatives for citizen engagement in STI are more likely to succeed if they incorporate the following areas and ideas:

• Diverse Outreach: Engage a wide range of citizens, including underrepresented groups, the use of inclusive narratives, trusted voices, and effective use of media.

• Level Playing Field: Ensure all participants can express their views to avoid polarisation by facilitating discussions before strong opinions form and using neutral facilitators and spaces.

• Early Engagement: Facilitate discussions before strong opinions form to foster open dialogue.

• Aligned Design: Tailor design choices, such as format and tools, to align with specific objectives, ensuring they meet the unique needs of the participatory initiative.

In practice, public engagement can take different forms, and while governments have rolled out a number of initiatives for bringing new voices to the table, ensuring that they have an impact on policy still remains difficult. In the United Kingdom, the Climate Assembly UK engaged around 100 randomly selected citizens in 2020 to jointly develop with experts a series of recommendations to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the country, with similar experiments taking place in countries such as Austria, Denmark and Germany; in France, the French Citizens’ Convention for Climate similarly brought together 150 randomly selected citizens to propose policy recommendations aimed at reducing the country’s greenhouse gas emissions.

The participation of public sector officials in citizen engagement can be beneficial as it can help decision-makers to gain a deeper understanding of the diverse needs and concerns of citizens, helping them shape policies that better respond to citizens’ needs and thereby increase the likelihood of successful implementation. Their direct participation can also foster greater trust in public institutions, combating distrust in government.

Efforts should also be made to broaden societal engagement in STI systems more generally, including of constituencies that may be negatively affected by technological and economic transformations. Many countries implement dedicated support programmes for underrepresented groups undertaking research and innovation activities, such as the Women in CleanTech Challenge in Canada, the Program to Support Research Activities of Female Researchers in Japan and the Competitive Start Fund for Female Entrepreneurs in Ireland (Planes-Satorra and Paunov, 2017[4]). These are often complemented by sectoral and regional initiatives to address related inclusion challenges.

While important strides have been made in building engagement platforms with societal stakeholders and citizens, most STI policy is not effectively leveraging those inputs and orchestrating the actions and connections between citizens, industry, research institutions. This partly reflects the challenges of effective citizen engagement and the diversity of incentives of stakeholders that come to play in transitions. Nonetheless, success stories that were only possible due to innovative collaborative governance demonstrate change is possible. An example is the sustainable transformation in transportation, building, and energy of the city of Oslo.

What can policymakers do?

• Enhance mechanisms for industry-research-public collaboration for the green transition:

  • Define a strategic role for industry in technology- and issue-specific STI objectives and articulate a clear economic rationale for diverse industry and research stakeholders to participate in new forms of collaboration.

  • Support co-ordinated industry-research-public collaboration, establish new platforms if necessary or broaden the participation of existing ones; enable industry to pursue bottom-up innovation and technology development in line with governments’ and societies’ strategic goals.

  • Leverage STI policy instruments to promote and allow for inter-disciplinary cross-sectoral STI aimed at supporting green innovations and their diffusion, focusing on setting the right incentives among participants.

• Support the design and implementation of citizens’ engagement in STI policy:

  • Engage in effective targeted citizen engagement processes, prioritising core areas, effective design and feedback mechanisms to establish long-term relations.

  • Leverage citizen engagement to build societal trust in government, public officials and policy, focusing on the inclusiveness of engagement processes.

  • Scale citizen engagement initiatives and channel insights gained thorough this engagement to inform STI policy.

References

[1] Arnold, E. et al. (2023), “Navigating green and digital transitions: Five imperatives for effective STI policy”, OECD Science, Technology and Industry Policy Papers, No. 162, OECD Publishing, Paris, https://doi.org/10.1787/dffb0747-en.

[2] OECD (2024), “OECD Agenda for Transformative Science, Technology and Innovation Policies”, OECD Science, Technology and Industry Policy Papers, No. 164, OECD Publishing, Paris, https://doi.org/10.1787/ba2aaf7b-en.

[3] Paunov, C. and S. Planes-Satorra (2023), “Engaging citizens in innovation policy: Why, when and how?”, OECD Science, Technology and Industry Policy Papers, No. 149, OECD Publishing, Paris, https://doi.org/10.1787/ba068fa6-en.

[4] Planes-Satorra, S. and C. Paunov (2017), OECD Science, Technology and Industry Working Papers, Inclusive innovation policies: Lessons from international case studies, No. No. 2017/2, OECD Publishing, Paris, https://doi.org/10.1787/a09a3a5d-en.

Contact

Caroline Paunov (✉ [e-mail])