Beyond experiments: Embedding outcomes in climate governance

Abstract

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.

Innovation Pathways for Age-Friendly Homes in Europe

“…In our view, the term embedding also entails a reciprocal process as a journey of accumulating changes in relation to cumulatively more ordered and stable socio-technical configurations which experimental outputs come to have an influence. Our notion of embedding thus characterizes the overall process by which outputs of experiments may come to generate wider influence beyond their initial conception and setting, which can happen through a diverse set of mechanisms [53]. This is not limited to the mechanisms providing economic incentives and fostering the creation market for age-friendly homes (as propagated in the Silver Economy narrative).…”

Polycentric energy governance: Under what conditions do energy communities scale?

“…The growing complexity of climate governance has produced an overall setting characterized by growing experimentation (Sengers et al, 2020), as well as local (Bulkeley et al, 2014), and translocal (Loorbach et al, 2017) action. Multiple types of actors are tied together through multiple policy dimensions, scales, and domains involving a variety of institutions (Heinen et al, 2022).…”

Positive Energy Districts: The 10 Replicated Solutions in Maia, Reykjavik, Kifissia, Kladno and Lviv

“…In their study, Summeren et al [35] explore what replication of community-based Virtual Power Plant (cVPP) experiments look like in practice and how this can be achieved, emphasizing that 'pure' replication is not the way forward but instead, it is about the combination of processes that lead to wider diffusion. Nonetheless, there is little in-depth understanding of replication and little literature evidence on the topic [36,37]. Dialogues on replication of experiments remain mostly highly theoretical.…”

“…Dialogues on replication of experiments remain mostly highly theoretical. There is little information regarding how replication happens in practice and what are the perspectives and ambitions of the participating actors [36][37][38]. This is particularly observed as an issue when looking at grassroots initiatives, which often do not strive for growth, diffusion, or system change, but are merely provide local solutions to local problems [39][40][41].…”