Over the past half-century, technological solutions have been anticipated or promised for many environmental problems which often resulted from previous technologies (Rosner, 2004). The recurrent promise has been satirized as follows: ‘The deterioration of the environment produced by technology is a technological problem for which technology has found, is finding, and will continue to find solutions.’ Within this circular logic, in practice, ‘technological innovation and efficiency improvements will continue to promote unsustainable growth’ (Huesemann and Huesemann, 2011: 77, 116). Indeed, invoking greater efficiency, technological advance has often incentivized economic growth and larger markets, thus aggravating resource burdens and environmental degradation.

In some cases, a techno-innovation has been ridiculed as ‘a solution in search of a problem’. Hence the well-known aphorism: ‘I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail’ (Maslow, 1966: 15). Originally called ‘the law of the instrument’ in psychology, this aphorism highlights how technical tools narrowly define a problem, thus implying a simple solution.

Given the numerous potential hammer-fixes, some have gained relatively more elite support and influenced societal futures. Which fixes, why and how? In recent decades, EU policy has emphasized techno-market fixes. To investigate them, here are some questions:

• • How do policy frameworks promote market-type incentives and competition, supposedly in order to generate technological fixes for environmental problems (especially climate change)?

• • How do those fixes encourage a passive public to accept or await them, meanwhile continuing harmful production systems?

• • How do opponents contest those fixes, stimulate public controversy and so open up different societal futures?

• • How do such opponents attempt to build a social agency for alternative solutions?

• • In those ways, how do claims for solutions promote divergent societal futures, serving either system change or continuity?

Beyond each case: How can cross-case comparisons inform strategies for system change?

To help answer those questions, this chapter first explains some analytical concepts, in particular: rival social orders, techno-market fixes, sociotechnical imaginaries, transformative mobilizations and PAR. Together these concepts provide a big picture to illuminate the case studies here, as well as other controversial cases.