Innovation develops unsustainably, destroying the environment, increasing pollution, and harming human health—rebound effect mean even efficient tech fails.

Cluster B displays significant growth in the number of publications per year, compared to the other clusters. Most of the articles of this cluster have a meso-level unit of analysis and examine socio-technical systems (e.g. electricity, agro-food, transportation, etc.) These works address the unintended and harmful effects of innovation and investigate the complex interactions between the biophysical, social, economic and institutional factors resulting from the introduction of an innovation in the current socio-technical system. These studies tend to emphasise the directionality of transitions, arguing that innovations can have a tendency to develop in unsustainable ways. For instance, in an ethnographic study of Danish households, Røpke, Christensen, and Jensen (2010) explore unsustainable patterns of consumption of ICT. The study shows that the energy that is consumed by these technologies (including the most energy efficient ones) keeps increasing with their incorporation in everyday social practices. As a result, the energy reductions derived from more efficient technologies are outweighed by the energy consumption of ICT in households. In a study of the agricultural system, Wigboldus et al. (2016) investigate the scaling of agricultural-improving technologies such as disease-resistant seeds, permaculture cultivation practices and automated milking systems. They show how the scaling up of these technologies may pose a series of undesirable effects such as unanticipated environmental degradation effects, poor farm worker labour conditions and loss of control by farming communities over seeds. For example, pesticides give positive economic returns in the short run, but generate negative externalities in the form of environmental degradation and adverse impacts on human health. The adoption of these detrimental innovations is ascribed (mostly) to the fact that the agricultural system became locked into a path-dependent production model which has developed along a direction that it is difficult to change despite its being environmentally and socially unsustainable. Of particular interest is that the research in this cluster, stresses that, in some cases, even innovations designed to contribute positively to the environment – see, e.g. improvements to materials and improved energy efficiency in buildings – may cause significant unintended negative impacts on society, including greater consumption and increased waste and pollution, giving rise to the so-called ‘rebound (or take-back) effect’ (Frondel 2004; Herring 2004). Herring and Roy (2007) study is a fitting example of this. They examine the rebound effect in an empirical study focused on the factors that influence consumers’ adoption of low and zero carbon technologies. They show that adopting energy-efficient technologies can result in reduced energy consumption, in the short term, of between 10% and 20%; however, this positive effect is soon outweighed by rising levels of consumption. Rebound effects are observed, also, in the transportation system, as noted by Wang, Zhou, and Zhou (2012), who investigate the direct rebound effect for passenger transport in China in the period 2002–2007 and show that energysaving transport systems reduce transport costs, but that the energy reductions are offset by increased demand for public transport due to its lower costs.