Missing cannibalisation

We argue that sustainability transition strategies need exnovation policies. One main argument is the limited substitution or cannibalisation of unsustainable products by more sustainable products fulfilling the same function. When an innovation like renewable energy diffuses, it is expected to displace fossil energy production. But, generally, a stacking of alternatives takes place, rather than a complete replacement. This stacking is problematic since what is less sustainable remains, but also because the additional (more sustainable) production makes overall production and consumption grow, and this increases in turn overall environmental impacts (indeed even if more sustainable innovations generate less impacts than the counterpart, they do generate impacts). In parallel to supporting the emergence of so-called sustainable innovations, it is thus necessary to reduce the less sustainable equivalent (as targeted by exnovation policies), to make this replacement happen effectively. This is however rarely the case. Taking the energy transition as an exemple, we can observe at each COP the reluctance of countries to commit to decrease fossil fuel energy production, while agreeing to expand renewable energy production. This focus on innovations is supported by a specific cognitive bias. Psychologists have shown that when people seek to address an issue, they “systematically default to searching for additive transformations, and consequently overlook subtractive transformations” (Adams et al., 2021).