Design Of Innovation Policy In The Context Of Climate Change: Moroccan Innovation Policy

ABSTRACTContext and background:Internationally, innovation policy is recognized as one of the main policies used to tackle sustainability challenges such as climate change, especially in the mission-oriented innovation policy era. In the Moroccan context, the current national strategy for innovation is “Morocco Innovation” adopted in 2009. Besides the former policy, the treatment of problems such as climate change has evolved through sectoral policies.Goal and Objectives:Our analysis aims to evaluate the actual design of innovation policy in Morocco in terms of its ability to address sustainability issues such as climate change. Hence, we can identify the new lines to follow by politicians to design efficient innovation policies to face major societal challenges.Methodology:To assess policy design, we propose a framework combining the main contributions currently existing in the literature with an earlier modified version of a framework of failures for the design of innovation policies for transformative change. It accounts for 12 adaptation lines, that a policy should follow to achieve a transformative change and overcome grand challenges. According to the suggested framework, we analyzed the current situation of innovation policy through the case of climate change policy in Morocco. In this sense, conformities and deviations of innovation policies in Morocco are then identified with proposals for paths of reform.Results:With the third generation, the main lines of adaptation added in the framework proposed are developmental evaluation and misconduct management. The current national innovation policy in Morocco suffers from huge shortcomings, it remains in the era of national systems of innovation policies and did not enter the third generation yet.  For the context of climate change, the country knew a succession of plans for climate change from the National Plan to tackle Global Warming (PGW) adopted in 2009 to the National Climate Plan (NCP) in 2020. In this sequence of plans, innovation was included in some pillars, nevertheless, it remained of the same nature over time. Hence, we need an explicit national strategy for innovation designed in a transformative change approach oriented toward missions shaping major challenges designed according to the 12 adaptation lines proposed.