Beyond experiments: Embedding outcomes in climate governance

• Published in: Environment and planning. C, Politics and space Vol. 39; no. 6; pp. 1148 - 1171
• Main Authors: Sengers, Frans, Turnheim, Bruno, Berkhout, Frans
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: London, England SAGE Publications 01.09.2021; SAGE Publishing
• Subjects: Ecology, environment; Life Sciences; climate governance; Experiments; sustainability transitions; socio-technical systems; Socio-technical systems; Sustainability transitions; Climate governance
• ISSN: 2399-6544; 2399-6552
• DOI: 10.1177/2399654420953861

Concerted action on climate change will require a continuing stream of social and technical innovations whose development and transmission will be influenced by public policies. New ways of doing things frequently emerge in innovative small-scale initiatives – ‘experiments’ – across sectors of economic and social life. These experiments are actionable expressions of novel governance and socio-technical arrangements. Mobilising and generalising the outputs of these experiments could lead to deep reductions in greenhouse gas emissions over the long-term. It is often assumed that the groundswell of socio-technical and governance experiments will ‘scale-up’ to systemic change. But the mechanisms for these wider, transformative impacts of experiments have not been fully conceptualised and explained. This paper proposes a conceptual framework for the mobilisation, generalisation and embedding of the outputs and outcomes of climate governance experiments. We describe and illustrate four ‘embedding mechanisms’ – (1) replication-proliferation; (2) expansion-consolidation; (3) challenging-reframing; and (4) circulation-anchoring – for entwined governance and socio-technical experiments. Through these mechanisms knowledge, capabilities, norms and networks developed by experiments become mobile and generic, and come to be embedded in reconfigured socio-technical and governance systems.