This article examines how local experiments and negotiation processes contribute to social and field-level learning. The analysis is framed within the niche development literature, which offers a framework for analyzing the relation between projects in local contexts and the transfer of local experiences into generally applicable rules. The authors examine 2 case studies drawn from a meta-analysis of 27 new energy projects. The case studies, both pertaining to biogas projects for local municipalities, illustrate the diversity of applications for a technology through processes of local variation and selection. The authors examine the diversity of expectations and the negotiation and alignment of these expectations underlying the diversity of local solutions. Moreover, the authors address how the transfer of lessons from individual local experiments can follow different pathways and yet always require due attention to the social and cultural limits to the transferability of solutions.

Research on sustainable practices has attracted increasing interest as a way to understand energy demand and transitions towards sustainability. In this paper we elaborate on how practice theories can inform the discussion of experimentation. Practice theory suggests that the everyday life of people appears recalcitrant. Practices are robust, resilient and have multiple, historically formed constituents and are thereby difficult to destabilize and change quickly. The making and breaking of links inside and between practices is highlighted, as is the need for enduring, multi-sited change efforts. Practice theory further helps us to better understand the constitution of new, levelled forms of expertise, the distributed nature of experimentation and the enrolment of citizens as active participants in sustainability transitions. We have operationalized and examined these suggestions in a Finnish research project related to climate change mitigation and energy use in detached houses. We report specific modes of experimentation and innovation, including user innovations, and the shared resources of situated expertise, the collective and shared processes of empowerment and the ways in which normality is challenged by ruptures in everyday life. Based on the results, we derive suggestions for effective policy interventions. We also bring forward a set of generic suggestions for more sensitive, appreciative and effective public policies on sustainability transitions and cast experimentation in a particular and partial role in such policies.

Transition management, Long-term policy design, Policy transfer, Environmental policy, Health care policy, Innovation, Sustainability,

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