What are transformative experiments and what do they have to do with urban climate change adaptation? These are the questions addressed in the article “Towards Transformative Change. Exploring the key elements of experimental approaches in urban climate change adaptation” by Johannes Suitner. In it, the author describes the importance that experimental approaches can have for accelerating comprehensive social change and elaborates on the now extensive scientific literature on the concept of practice-oriented experimentation. Suitner also addresses the fact that such experiments are all too often only about technology testing and infrastructure development, but far too rarely about the equally important social challenges of the sustainability transition and societal transformation, and thus builds a bridge to the SIAMESE research approach. He describes what climate and sustainability experiments have to do with social innovation and proposes a framework for analysing how the dimensions associated with social innovation in experiments can be captured analytically. The paper thus provides important preliminary work for the upcoming research on selected Austrian climate and sustainability experiments in SIAMESE from summer 2022.
The article is available in the download area of the SIAMESE website and on the journal website (http://oes.tuwien.ac.at/article/id/608/).
Source and suggested citation: Suitner, J. (2022): Towards Transformative Change. Exploring the key elements of experimental approaches in urban climate change adaptation. In: The Public Sector – The Public Sector, 47(2), 53-64. doi: 10.34749/oes.2021.4608.