SWPS 2015-36 (December) DisclaimerThe works available here are the responsibility of the individual author(s) and do not necessarily represent the views of other SPRU researchers. As matters of policy and practice, SPRU does not endorse individual research contributions.
Guidelines for authorsPapers shall be submitted in pdf or Word format. They should contain a title, an abstract, and keywords. Papers should be submitted to one of the Editors, who will process them and send them to the appropriate Associate Editor. Two members of SPRU will be asked to provide a short written review within three weeks. The revised versions of the paper, together with a reply to the reviewers, should be sent to the Associate Editor, who will propose to the Editors its publication on the series. When submitting the authors should indicate if the paper has already undergone peer-reviewing, in which case the Associate Editors may decide to skip internal review process. The SPRU Working Paper Series aims to accelerate the public availability of the research undertaken by SPRU-associated people of all categories, and exceptionally, other research that is of considerable interest within SPRU. It presents research results that in whole or part are suitable for submission to a refereed journal, to a sponsor, to a major conference or to the editor of a book. Our intention is to provide access to early copies of SPRU research.
AbstractExperimentation has been proposed as one of the ways in which public policy can drive sustainability transitions, notably by creating or delimiting space for experimenting with innovative solutions to sustainability challenges. In this paper we report on a systematic review of articles published between 2009 and 2015 that have addressed experiments aiming either at understanding decarbonisation transitions or enhancing climate resilience. Using the case survey method, we find few empirical descriptions of real-world experiments in climate and energy contexts in the scholarly literature, being observed in only 25 articles containing 29 experiments. We discuss the objectives, outputs and outcomes of these experiments noting that explicit experimenting with climate policies could be identified only in 12 cases. Based on the results we suggest a definition of climate policy experiments and a typology of experiments for sustainability transitions that can be used to better understand the role of and learn more effectively from experiments in sustainability transitions.