Bounded socio-technical experiments as agents of systemic change: The case of a zero-energy residential building

Brown, Halina Szejnwald; Vergragt, Philip J.

doi:10.1016/j.techfore.2006.05.014

Cited by 191 publications

(105 citation statements)

References 13 publications

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“…a neighborhood or a building) (e.g. Brown and Vergragt, 2008). In addition to having 46 real-world impacts, such experiments are research endeavors to the extent that they 47 produce evidence regarding both the persistent unsustainability of dominant regimes and the 48 possible solutions to given sustainability problems within the bounded space of a laboratory 49 (Evans and Karvonen, 2011;.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Learning through evaluation – A tentative evaluative scheme for sustainability transition experiments

Luederitz

Schäpke

Wiek

et al. 2017

Journal of Cleaner Production

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Transitions towards sustainability are urgently needed to address the interconnected challenges of economic development, ecological integrity, and social justice, from local to global scales. Around the world, collaborative science-society initiatives are forming to conduct experiments in support of sustainability transitions. Such experiments, if carefully designed, provide significant learning opportunities for making progress on transition efforts. Yet, there is no broadly applicable evaluative scheme available to capture this critical information across a large number of cases, and to guide the design of transition experiments. To address this gap, the article develops such a scheme, in a tentative form, drawing on evaluative research and sustainability transitions scholarship, alongside insights from empirical cases. We critically discuss the scheme's key features of being generic, comprehensive, operational, and formative. Furthermore, we invite scholars and practitioners to apply, reflect and further develop the proposed tentative scheme -making evaluation and experiments objects of learning.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Learning through evaluation – A tentative evaluative scheme for sustainability transition experiments

Luederitz

Schäpke

Wiek

et al. 2017

Journal of Cleaner Production

Self Cite

246

203

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…The importance of a strong research base to underpin theory and practice is acknowledged to some extent in the health informatics literature [7,31]. However, the association between socio-technical concepts and health informatics practice and research is rarely articulated.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Thus, socio-technical systems at the local level will be influenced by broader economic, political and cultural systems and vice versa. As Brown and Vergragt observe, "it has become increasingly clear that human-IT micro systems are themselves embedded within larger systemic contexts, and that both these contexts, as well as the interactions and change processes both between and among them, need to be clearly conceptualized and explored in greater detail" [31] (Page 127).…”

Section: Broadening the Focusmentioning

confidence: 99%

Conceptual Challenges for Advancing the Socio-Technical Underpinnings of Health Informatics~!2010-04-08~!2010-04-11~!2010-09-14~!

Whetton¹

2010

TOMINFOJ

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This discussion paper considers the adoption of socio-technical perspectives and their theoretical and practical influence within the discipline of health informatics. The paper highlights the paucity of discussion of the philosophy, theory and concepts of socio-technical perspectives within health informatics. Instead of a solid theoretical base from which to describe, study and understand human-information technology interactions we continue to have fragmented, unelaborated understandings. This has resulted in a continuing focus on technical system performance and increasingly managerial outputs to the detriment of social and technical systems analysis. It has also limited critical analyses and the adaptation of socio-technical approaches beyond the immediate environment to the broader social systems of contemporary society, an expansion which is increasingly mandated in today's complex health environment.

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“…In addition, it is commonly assumed that the knowledge generated from experiments is intended to be scaled up both temporally and spatially (Brown & Vergragt, 2008;Evans, 2011;Nevens et al, 2013;Bulkeley et al, 2015). Evans and colleagues (2016: 4) argue that "part of the allure of experimentation is based on the assumption that it is possible to scale up from an individual project to the city through a process of trialling, learning and rolling out."…”

Section: The Allure Of Urban Experimentationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Innovating Climate Governance

Turnheim¹,

Kivimaa

Berkhout

2018

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Over the last decade, a multitude of urban climate change experiments have emerged to go beyond traditional role of the state in environmental governance. These activities provide a real world evidence base for how a low-carbon world could be realised and they have the potential to fundamentally change the way that cities are conceived, built, and managed. Most urban climate change experiments are designed to be geographically and temporally bounded to accelerate innovation activities and realise actual changes on the ground. But what if urban experiments did not scale up? What if, instead of informing existing modes of urban governance, they became the dominant approach to governing cities? What would a 'city of permanent experiments' look like and how would it function? This chapter speculates on the implications of experimentation as the new mode of governance for twenty-first century cities. Here, experiments are not interpreted as one-off trials to provide evidence and justification for new low-carbon policies, regulations, and service provision; instead, they are emerging as a new mode of governance in themselves. This emerging form of urban governance is characterised by uncertainty, recursive learning processes, and spatial fragmentation with multiple unknown implications on the politics of cities in the future.

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Bounded socio-technical experiments as agents of systemic change: The case of a zero-energy residential building

Cited by 191 publications

References 13 publications

Learning through evaluation – A tentative evaluative scheme for sustainability transition experiments

Learning through evaluation – A tentative evaluative scheme for sustainability transition experiments

Conceptual Challenges for Advancing the Socio-Technical Underpinnings of Health Informatics~!2010-04-08~!2010-04-11~!2010-09-14~!

Innovating Climate Governance

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