Sustainability and growth in regional Australia: developing innovation theory and policy using a complexity perspective

This study is about innovation and sustainability and the way that we depict systems related to them. It explores the potential use of innovation policy to contribute to transition from growth and development paradigms that erode the resilience of human and natural systems, toward those that support them. The intent is to provide both theoretical and practical contributions through deliberation about issues and problems at a fundamental philosophical level. The exploration and deconstruction of deep-seated issues concerning economic theory and practice, and their relationship to concepts of growth and sustainability, facilitates the development of complexity based theory of sustainable regional innovation systems. This theory and associated ways of perceiving and depicting systems, and constructing models that inform innovation policy making, are the main outputs of the research. Sustainability, as conceptualised in a systems and complexity based context, concerns increasing systemic resilience (Chapin, Kofinas, & Folke, 2009). The search for the means to enable and support synergistic co-evolution of holistic mental models, with increasing systemic resilience, is therefore another way of expressing the goal of the study. Growth created by this co-evolution is referred to as sustainable growth. Innovation, which is concerned with new ideas and the way they shape change, is characterised as the means through which this can be achieved. The contribution is philosophical and theoretical and has transformative implications for policy-making. In this regard it is also profoundly practical. This nexus is based on the central proposition that context and theory co-evolve and that policy-making is enacted within this co-evolutionary matrix. The discussion delves deeply into knowledge creation processes, and how these processes drive change. The theoretical discussion throughout the thesis is illuminated and enriched by analysis of data collected as part of a regional innovation program implemented in the Central Coast of New South Wales, Australia. This is used to provide depth to the theoretical perspectives, and ensure that the study is capable of informing a coherent loop from context to paradigms to metatheory to theory to applied theory to policy to context, which is the essential to the contribution.