Global sustainability is increasingly influenced by processes of industrialisation and urbanization in non-OECD countries, especially in Asia, where rapidly growing economies generate large new demands for resources and further play a significant role in international commodity and technology markets, while contributing heavily to global environmental problems, including climate change. Traditional growth models suggest that developing economies and regions will become first relatively more resource- and pollution-intensive, before converging on more resource-efficient and low-pollution production and consumption patterns expressed in developed countries. However, alternative growth models promise both a faster transition to resource-efficient and low emissions development pathways, as well as social and economic benefits in the short- and long-term, with technological innovation and capability-building playing a key part in generating and anchoring new, more sustainable ways of doing things; although the degree to which this innovation and learning takes place is as yet unknown.

Key approaches used in the drive toward creating these “sustainable development pathways” are sustainability experiments. Sustainability experiments (SE’s) represent a significant new source of innovation and capability formation, linked to global knowledge and technology flows, which could reshape emergent socio-technical regimes and so contribute to alternative development pathways in late-industrialising countries. SE’s can be defined as planned initiatives that embody a highly novel socio-technical configuration likely to lead to substantial (environmental) sustainability gains. These experiments play a key role in innovating socio-technical regimes, which constitute the social, institutional and technological fabric of economic activity. That is, socio-technical regime change is fundamental to structural change in economies, of the type that leads toward greater sustainability. However, there is still much to learn about the processes by which innovations emerging from SE’s could shape alternative, more sustainable development pathways.