Beyond experiments: Embedding outcomes in climate governance

Frans Sengers, Bruno Turnheim and Frans Berkhout
Additional contact information
Frans Sengers: 8125Utrecht University, the Netherlands
Bruno Turnheim: Institut National de la Recherche pour l’Agriculture, l’Alimentation et l’Environnement, Université Gustave Eiffel, France

Environment and Planning C, 2021, vol. 39, issue 6, 1148-1171

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.

Keywords: Experiments; climate governance; socio-technical systems; sustainability transitions (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2399654420953861 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:envirc:v:39:y:2021:i:6:p:1148-1171

DOI: 10.1177/2399654420953861

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Environment and Planning C
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().