18Oct 2014
CFP Funded workshop – ‘Climate Change Policy and Governance: Initiation, Experimentation and Evaluation, March 2015, Helsinki, Finland
20:58 - By Hal Colebatch - Events
This workshop takes a fresh look at what can be learned from experiments and attempts at experimentation in the context of climate change governance. The focus is on experimenting as a broader societal/governance phenomenon and on the ways experiments materialize and challenge existing policies, practices and regulatory systems. This fully funded workshop encourages exploration of experiments from many different angles with the aim to catalyse thinking about experiments, processes of experimentation and the use of experiments. It is expected to bring together new empirical and theoretical analyses. The workshop welcomes theoretical papers, methodological papers, conceptual and empirical studies or combinations thereof. The aim is to eventually publish the contributions presented at the workshop, subject to normal review process, as a Special Volume in a suitable journal.
Call for papers: funded workshop – ‘Climate Change Policy and Governance: Initiation, Experimentation and Evaluation
12-13 March 2015, Helsinki
This workshop takes a fresh look at what can be learned from experiments and attempts at experimentation in the context of climate change governance. The focus is on experimenting as a broader societal/governance phenomenon and on the ways experiments materialize and challenge existing policies, practices and regulatory systems. This fully funded workshop encourages exploration of experiments from many different angles with the aim to catalyse thinking about experiments, processes of experimentation and the use of experiments. It is expected to bring together new empirical and theoretical analyses. The workshop welcomes theoretical papers, methodological papers, conceptual and empirical studies or combinations thereof. The aim is to eventually publish the contributions presented at the workshop, subject to normal review process, as a Special Volume in a suitable journal.
Topical areas
The workshop welcomes theoretical papers, methodological papers, conceptual and empirical studies or combinations thereof that investigate unanswered questions such as:
1) Experiments as examples of innovative, participatory approaches to climate governance: why and how have the experiments emerged, who are the agents and what do the experiments achieve at the level at which they are conducted?
2) Experimenting as a way to bypass obstacles of traditional policy development by creating niches in which new ideas for local but also national and even international climate policy development can be explored. Do experiments pave the way for the diffusion of innovations or are they mere distractions and used as a delaying tactic? How can their role be evaluated? What is their true effectiveness in different sectors compared with other climate change mitigation/adaptation measures?
3) What is the transformative power and mechanisms of experiments and how do they link to policies that promote, implement and upscale the experiments. How can the transformative power and upscaling be evaluated? Do experiments reveal or demonstrate causal relationships that are important for policy development? How do experiments challenge existing systems and practice and how do experiments contribute to and get consolidated in regulation and new policies?
4) How do experiments fit with existing governance systems and sectoral policymaking? What are the drivers and barriers to climate policy experiments in exist in EU, national and regional administrations?
5) The differences and similarities between experiments for adaptation and mitigation. How does the context influence the possibilities to experiment at different levels of governance?
6) What is the relationship between experimentation, niche management, transition theory and legal theories such as reflexive law and what are the implications for the evaluation of experiments? Target audience
The workshop is designed to forge new and productive alliances between scholars in the area of governance studies, innovation research, science and technology studies, evaluation research, legal studies and transition studies. Practicalities and submission dead lines
The workshop will be funded under the 4 year COST Action INOGOV (IS1309 Innovations in Climate Governance: Sources, Patterns and Effects) (2014-8). INOGOV will cover reasonable travel costs and accommodation of all invited authors, subject to standard COST reimbursement and eligibility rules.
INOGOV published two special issues, in Environmental Politics (2014, Vol. 23 (5) and Global Environmental Change (2014): in press.
Please submit 1000 words abstracts by November 30, 2014 as a first step towards full paper development, to: Prof Mikael Hildén, Finnish Environment Institute (mikael.hilden@ymparisto.fi)
For further details about the scope and background to the workshop, visit:
http://www.syke.fi/en-US/Research__Development/Research_and_development_projects/Projects/COSTInnovations_in_climate_governance
Advisory Board
Prof. Andrew Jordan, UEA, UK
Prof. Dave Huitema, VU/OU, NL
Dr. Elin Lerum Boasson, CICERO, Norway
Prof. Jale Tosun, University of Heidelberg, Germany