Beyond experiments: Embedding outcomes in climate governance

Frans Sengers,Bruno Turnheim,Frans Berkhout

doi:10.1177/2399654420953861

Frans Sengers, Bruno Turnheim + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1177/2399654420953861

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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.

Highlights

The window of opportunity to address climate change whilst remaining within 1.5 C above pre-industrial temperatures is closing fast and current national commitments are not sufficient to fill the greenhouse gas emissions gap (IPCC, 2018; UNEP, 2019)
Over the last 25 years considerable political effort has been invested in an international governance regime centred on the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (Van Asselt et al, 2018)
Since we are less interested in experimentation as a specific research method, we focus attention on the part of the governance literature that conceives of experimentation as a practical approach to governance (Huitema et al, 2009, 2018), regardless of the related degree of coordination or formalisation (Turnheim et al, 2018)

Summary

Introduction

The expectation is that new actors will take ‘climate action’ and develop practical ways of reducing emissions, filling the ‘governance gap’ (Bernstein and Hoffmann, 2018; Jordan et al, 2013, 2015; Jordan and Huitema, 2014a, 2014b) Much of this action is experimental in character. Since global agreement on climate action has proven elusive, the groundswell of innovative local and transnational initiatives has become a focus for academic enquiry (Bulkeley et al, 2012; Castan Broto and Bulkeley, 2013; Keohane and Victor, 2011) These ‘climate governance experiments’ (Hoffmann, 2011) or ‘climate change experiments’ (Bulkeley et al, 2015) can be seen as expressions of polycentric governance in action (Ostrom, 2010) and their rise to prominence represents a parallel response compared the traditional multilateral climate governance regime (Jordan et al, 2018).

Objectives

Conclusion