From Limits to Growth to greenhouse gas emission pathways: Representing future technological change in global models (1972-2007)

Résumé En

From the World models used by the Club of Rome in the 1970s to study “the predicament of mankind” to contemporary Integrated Assessment Models producing greenhouse gas emission pathways for the IPCC, global models have served as laboratories for the articulation of economic, environmental and technological knowledge. Despite their differences, these models all rely on conceptions of technological change and innovation as drivers of the long-term evolution of human societies. Much effort and controversy has gone into modelling technological change as a quantifiable, global variable. What can the history of global modelling tell us about shifting understandings and conflicting conceptualizations of technological change and innovation in the second half of the twentieth century? In this paper, we argue that the development and confrontation of global models constituted technological change into a distinct variable and an object of research. We analyse debates on the conception, representation and formalisation of technological change as they played out at four moments in the history of global modelling: the publication of the Limits to Growth in 1972; the ensuing “futures debate” when models were developed to provide alternative futures to the Limits to Growth; the publication of the IIASA Energy Study in 1981; and discussions about the representation of technological change in Integrated Assessment Models from the late 1990s onwards, when global models turned to climate change. In these four instances, conceptions of technological change were opened up, making it possible to analyse the relations between modelling choices and the political discussions models take part in. We show that, while in the 1970s technological change was explicitly understood as a social phenomenon, its formalisation as a quantifiable parameter with its own predictable dynamic drew focus away from its relations to social change.