News

18.10.2021

The Committee for Technological Innovation and Ethics (Komet) in Sweden hosted a webinar on Regulatory Experiments, where Dierk Bauknecht presented his work and experiences on "Design and Evaluation of Regulatory Experiments". A recording of the webinar is available here:

https://www.kometinfo.se/activities/#

The Chair for Sustainability and Transitions Research is looking for a student assistant. More information here. If you are interested, please send your application to: dierk.bauknecht@sustainability-transitions.uni-freiburg.de

The Chair of Sustainability and Transformation Research is represented with 3 contributions at the "International Sustainability Transitions" (IST) conference. Among them are two full paper contributions: "Regulatory experiments as a tool for sustainability transitions: conceptualisation and empirical findings" and "The third phase of the energy transitions" as well as a dialogue session: "Visions of decentralisation in the energy transition".

The motto of this year's conference is "Mainstraiming sustainability transitions: From research towards impact". Further information on the conference and registration can be found here.

Regulatory experiments can play an important role in shaping sustainability transformations. They make it possible to test future regulatory options before they are "rolled out". Such regulatory experiments are already being used or developed in a number of countries. The International Smart Grid Action Network (ISGAN) within the IEA has organised an international knowledge exchange on this, in which Dierk Bauknecht participated.  Among other things, joint messages to policy-makers were developed. These were presented at the Clean Energy Ministerial (CEM), hosted by Chile from 31 May to 6 June 2021. The CEM is a high-level global forum to promote policies and programmes that advance renewable energy technologies, share experiences and best practices, and foster the transition to a global renewable energy economy.

The policy messages and a video are available here.

Experiments are an important governance instrument to support niche development, promote niche-regime interaction, challenge existing regimes and manage transition pathways for sustainable development. However, policy and regulatory learning of experiments are under-explored in the transition experimentation literature. Thus, this paper examines the following research question: How is the up-take of regulatory experiments for sustainability transitions influenced by their design elements and what role do institutional dynamics play in their up-take? The paper uses comparative qualitative content analysis to examine 27 international cases of regulatory experiments. We analyze the up-take of experiment results towards the three dimensions of scalability, transferability and unintended consequences. The analysis demonstrates that the timeframe, timing, political support, regulatory context, geographical particularities, selection processes, evaluation procedures, test of different design options, heterogeneity of participants and communication processes are important influencing factors for the up-take of experiment results.

Daniel Feser, Simon Winkler-Portmann, Thore Sören Bischoff, Dierk Bauknecht, Kilian Bizer, Martin Führ, Dirk Arne Heyen, Till Proeger, Kaja von der Leyen, Moritz Vogel (2021): Institutional conditions for the up-take of governance experiments – A comparative case study. URL: https://www.ifh.wiwi.uni-goettingen.de/upload/veroeffentlichungen/WP/ifh_wp-28_2021.pdf