Innovating Climate Governance: Moving Beyond Experiments

After the perceived failure of global approaches to tackling climate change, enthusiasm for local climate initiatives has blossomed world-wide, suggesting a more experimental approach to climate governance. Innovating Climate Governance: Moving Beyond Experiments looks critically at climate governance experimentation, focusing on how experimental outcomes become embedded in practices, rules and norms. Policy which encourages local action on climate change, rather than global burden-sharing, suggests a radically different approach to tackling climate issues. This book reflects on what climate governance experiments achieve, as well as what happens after and beyond these experiments. A bottom-up, polycentric approach is analyzed, exploring the outcomes of climate experiments and how they can have broader, transformative effects in society. Contributions offer a wide range of approaches and cover more than fifty empirical cases internationally, making this an ideal resource for academics and practitioners involved in studying, developing and evaluating climate governance.

Bruno Turnheim is Research Associate with the Department of Geography at King's College London, a Research Fellow with the Manchester Institute of Innovation Research (MIoIR) at the University of Manchester, and Associate Fellow with the Science Policy Research Unit (SPRU) at the University of Sussex. The overriding theme of his research concerns the role of innovation and transformative change for sustainability. His current research focuses on the governance of sustainability transitions, conceptual and methodological integration of research approaches to sustainability transitions, the role of local experimentation for transformative change, the diffusion of system innovation, and the destabilization of socio-technical regimes.

Paula Kivimaa is a Senior Research Fellow with the Science Policy Research Unit (SPRU) at the University of Sussex, and a Senior Researcher with the Finnish Environment Institute (SYKE). Kivimaa is an expert in sustainability transition and innovation studies, focused on the interface of policy and innovation. Recently, she has conducted novel research on policy mixes, intermediaries and experiments in transitions, covering a range of empirical contexts from transport to bioenergy and energy efficiency of buildings. Dr Kivimaa frequently engages with policy-oriented audiences, including invited talks at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), and the Finnish Ministries of the Environment and of Transport and Communications.

Frans Berkhout is Executive Dean of the Faculty of Social Science and Public Policy, and Professor of Environment, Society and Climate in the Department of Geography at King's College London. His work is concerned with science, technology, policy and sustainability, with a focus on climate change. He was a lead author in the fourth (2007) and fifth (2014) assessment reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and is chair of UK Future Earth.