Session SS09 Varieties of Experimental Governance: North-South Dialogues on Policy Innovation and Regional Transitions will explore the possibilities and limits of experimental governance and policy innovation to facilitate regional transitions towards more inclusive and sustainable futures.
Specifically, they invite abstracts that explore:
- The politics and spatiality of experimentation within regional and innovation policy: clusters, smart specialization strategies, innovation districts, etc.
- How experimentation may be discursively and/or relationally rescaling climate change governance so that the ‘regional scale’ becomes a critical policy space.
- The relation between policy mobilities and experimentation in regional policymaking, including ‘what moves’ and ‘doesn’t move’, through what actors, networks, circuits, etc.
- Different practices or techniques that can help imagine and implement alternative futures, particularly beyond North-originated development visions and policy models.
- The relationship between policy experiments and specific institutional challenges and transformations (e.g. differences in role of the state; geopolitics of the environment, etc.)
- Experimentalism, city networks and platform governance related to questions about who orchestrates experimentation and to what purpose (government, philanthropy, corporate, etc.).
- Experimentalism and the limits of solutionism, including reflections around the possibilities and limits of nature-based solutions.
- Methodological strategies and tactics to analyze the role of experiments, co-production, laboratories or other ways in which policy innovation is taking place in different regions across the North and South.