Experimental climate governance as organized irresponsibility? A case for revamping governing (also) through government

Abstract

Experiments in socio-ecological change—real-world laboratories, testbeds, niche experiments, grassroots innovations—are commonly framed as a particularly promising way to respond to pressing challenges such as climate change. In contrast to top-down, expert- and techno-scientific innovation-driven, one-size-fits-all environmental interventions, experimental governance promises to work in the concrete rather than the abstract; to resonate with citizens instead of alienating them, and to give ample space to learning by surprise at a distance from regulatory controls. Without questioning the virtues of experimental governance tout court, this article challenges boosterish accounts of it by arguing and illustrating that “going experimental” may also run a risk. The palpable risk here is fostering a (local) government’s “liberation from responsibility” for tackling the climate crisis by instead encouraging a wide array of local, experimental interventions at a distance to accounting for how particular interventions relate to larger political goals—arguably a form of “organized irresponsibility.” Three common implications of the “rise of experimentation” in governing climate change contribute to this risk: the sidelining of public authority as a specific and key agent of change; the discrediting of top-down governance as undemocratic, if not authoritarian; and the sidestepping of societal change through collectively-binding political decisions. By combining empirical and theoretical insights, this article makes the case for revamping “governing (also) through government.” It does so by offering ways of rethinking public authority, top-down governance, and change by political decision without reasserting what experimentation seeks to transcend: state- and expert-centric, undemocratic, and sovereigntist forms of governing.

Keywords:

• Experimental governance
• climate change
• liberation from responsibility
• organized irresponsibility
• public authority
• governing through government
• political decision

Introduction

The governance of climate change comes with a dilemma. On one hand, climate scientists stress the need for “rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society” (IPCC 2018, 1) to drastically reduce carbon-dioxide (CO₂) emissions and their disastrous impact on the habitability of the planet. On the other hand, radical interventions for the sake of mitigating climate change and its social and ecological consequences are readily framed and discredited as green authoritarianism (Küppers 2022). One way out of this dilemma, shaped by the need for radical societal change from an ecological perspective and lacking societal support for radical interventions, is the “rise of experimentation” (Bulkeley 2021, 272). The hope attached to ecopolitical experimentation is that locally anchored, socially embedded, context-sensitive, participatory, adaptive, and reflexive interventions for mitigating and adapting to climate change are more likely to result in greater legitimacy and support for transformative change than, for instance, top-down, public authority- and expert-driven political decisions (Evans et al. 2016). In fact, as Bulkeley (2016) argues, the very possibility of accomplishing climate governance, seems to hinge on “going experimental.” Experiments in more climate-friendly forms of living, producing, consuming, and getting around (mobility), it is suggested, work in the concrete instead of the abstract (Bulkeley 2016, 102–127), resonate with citizens rather than alienate them (Meyer 2015), and give ample space to “learning by surprise” (Gross 2010, 30) at a distance “from regulatory controls which hamper evolution of ideas” (Seyfang 2009, 185). Experimentation, when understood as a way of conceiving of and dealing with socio-ecological realities that are pluralist, complex, context-dependent, contingent, and often uncertain, undecidable, and contested seems to be without alternative (see also the articles by Bulkeley and Meyer 2023, in this special issue).

“The promise of experimentation” (Evans et al. 2016, 1) is considered to embody a way out of the dilemma between the need for radical socio-ecological change and the lack of consent to and legitimacy for such interventions. On a more general level, however, experimental governance is framed as an alternative to especially modernist, including eco-modernist and sovereigntist, approaches to governing societal crises.¹ Modernist forms of governing are indebted to the idea that societal challenges such as climate change can be understood “scientifically” and “solved” by expert-informed politics of command, control, and (rational) planning (Scott 1998; Berman 2010; Taylor 1999). They assume that “scientific and technological progress could shape the world for good” (King 2015; see also Scott 1998), and that public authorities hold the ultimate capacity to govern and decide, if necessary—and this is where sovereigntism (or as Meyer 2023 puts it in this special issue, “absolutism”) comes into play—also at a distance to the governed in order to secure a given social order or to create an allegedly better one (Hobbes [1651] 2012; Philpott 2020; Graeber 2003). One specific feature of eco-modernist approaches to governing societal challenges is their belief in the compatibility of economic growth boosted by socio-technical innovation and environmental protection (Mol and Spaargaren 2000). This belief has been questioned by past and present limits-to-growth debates but has nonetheless remained the dominant paradigm in ecopolitics (Machin 2019). The “experimental turn” (Overdevest et al. 2010, 279) challenges modernist approaches to societal challenges on normative grounds (e.g., on democratic ones by endorsing greater participation) and epistemic grounds (e.g., by questioning assumptions of scientific certainty). It also confronts these approaches on the basis of effectiveness, as modernist forms of governing have often led to not only frequently poor, but occasionally disastrous, societal outcomes (see, among others, Scott 1998). In addition, proponents of experimentation are often critical of eco-modernist approaches to governing because they cast doubt on the very possibility of boosting environmental protection by green growth (see also Haberl et al. 2020; Hickel and Kallis 2020).

Yet is experimentation as a response to challenges such as climate change indeed “always good or always transformative” (Savini and Bertolini 2019, 837) as current environmental discourses, practices, research calls, and programs tend to suggest? To what extent does experimentation pave the way for new and more promising and effective, as well as democratic and epistemologically more convincing, forms of climate governance? And to what extent does experimentation itself affirm impasses or create new ones? Fully cognizant of the manifold forms and virtues of experimentation in climate governance (Bulkeley and Castán Broto 2013; Bulkeley, Castán Broto, and Gareth 2015; Bulkeley et al. 2018, 2019; Hoffmann 2011), this article argues that “going experimental” may also bear risks, such as the risk of serving as a license for a (local) government’s liberation from responsibility for tackling climate change. This may occur when (local) governments foster a wide array of experimental interventions without accounting for how specific interventions relate to larger political goals (such as climate goals)—a liberation that may amount to organized irresponsibility.²

By taking a closer look at academic writings on experimental climate governance, especially at common endorsements of this form of governance, and a concrete case focused on the experimental climate strategy of the city of Vienna, the article identifies and problematizes three common implications that come with the “rise of experimentation” (Bulkeley 2021, 272): the framing of public authority as one change agent among many; the casting of top-down governing as undemocratic, if not authoritarian; and the fading of change through collectively-binding, political decisions into the background.

Driven by these insights, the article makes a conceptual argument for revamping governing (also) through government, that is, a type of governing in which public authority, top-down, and collectively binding political decision-making continues to play an important role. By turning to political theory, democratic theory in particular, the article argues for rethinking public authority as a specific and key agent of change (as opposed to one among many), one that is (1) responsible for the res publica and for actualizing agreed-upon political goals; (2) for reconsidering top-down governing as compatible with (as opposed to antithetical to) democratic values and as key to actualizing agreed upon political norms and goals; and (3) for revisiting collectively binding, political decisions as a key lever for creating new, more sustainable path dependencies that are compatible with (as opposed to ignorant of) contingency. It does so without reasserting what the experimental turn in ecopolitics seeks to go beyond (namely modernist forms of governing) and in line with the promises of experimentation (namely a sensitivity to contingency, complexity, uncertainty, participation, context-sensitivity, and pluralism).

The article proceeds as follows. The next section maps the meanings attached to and the common ways of arguing for experimentation in academic, ecopolitical discourses. I specifically identify common conceptual implications in hopeful accounts of experimental governance and related risks. The following section illustrates the implications and risks of “going experimental” with a concrete case, namely the experimental climate strategy of the city of Vienna. Driven by these insights, I then draw on political theory as an “arsenal” for rethinking governing (also) through government. The conclusion recaps the main argument and provides an outlook on the currently burgeoning literature on “return of the state” which can be read as suggesting that the zenith of primarily experimental (climate) governance has been transgressed. If this is the case, the article—which is neither naïvely pro-state nor strictly anti-experimentalist—concludes with an emphasis on the need to rethink the nature of the state to return.

Meanings, implications, and risks of experimentation

The term experimentation in literature pertaining to socio-ecological transformation typically means two things: it serves as a label for specific interventions and, more generally, it designates a specific approach to societal challenges and responses to them. Experimentation as a label refers to climate-change experiments (Bulkeley and Castán Broto 2013; Hoffmann 2011), testbeds and demonstration-oriented pilots (Heiskanen et al. 2017; Ryghaug and Skjølsvold 2019), real-world laboratories and urban living labs (Bulkeley et al. 2018, 2019; Voytenko et al. 2016; von Wirth et al. 2019), niche experiments (Coenen and Morgan 2020), grassroots initiatives (Gernert et al. 2018; Håkansson 2018), and concrete utopias (Kallis and March 2015). When used as a label for specific interventions, the term experimentation varies considerably in meaning and scope (Evans and Karvonen 2014; Evans 2016). Whereas some interventions focus on working around the hurdles of bureaucracy or the impasses of majoritarian decision-making, others seek to break open the narrow confines of the laboratory to develop and test innovations in real-life settings. Others again, seek to unhinge the socio-material boundaries, norms, and practices that underpin societal reproduction at a given space in order to create an opening for the experience of new, ideally, more sustainable socio-ecological constellations (see the article by Exner and Strüver in this special issue).

Beyond pointing to concrete interventions that take place somewhere, the term experimentation signifies the (academic) endorsement of a specific approach to understanding and governing societal challenges, including climate change—the focus of this article. Experimentation understood and endorsed as an approach means greater sensitivity toward the contingent, complex, uncertain, context-dependent, and unavoidably pluralist nature of socio-ecological realities (see the article by Bulkeley in this special issue). It implies, among other factors, conceiving of and responding to these realities in ways that are open “to ready and flexible revision in light of observed consequences” (Dewey 2016, 220) at a clear distance to any “false promise” of certainty—be it scientific certainty embodied by experts or political certainty embodied by (self-declared) vanguards (Wainwright and Mann 2020). It challenges the view that scientific knowledge precedes political action and makes the case for in-situ, reflexive, collaborative, and adaptive learning and intervening instead (Bulkeley 2021, 279), including learning by surprise (Groß and Krohn 2005; Gross 2010; Schäpke et al. 2018). The latter seeks to operate at a distance from “regulatory controls” which are conceived of as hampering the “evolution of ideas” (Seyfang 2009, 185).

Apart from reconceiving the role of scientific knowledge in governing climate change, proponents of experimental climate governance challenge the view that “public authorities hold the ultimate capacity to govern” (Bulkeley 2021, 279, emphasis added). They explicitly stress that “authority does not reside with some actors and institutions because of their designation,” but that it “is created in and through governing” (Bulkeley and Schroeder 2012, 749), among others, also through “private authorities,” such as companies (be they profit- or nonprofit-oriented) or in public-private partnerships (Newell et al. 2012). They take issue with top-down governance as problematic “cockpit-ism” (Hajer et al. 2015, 1652; Geels 2019, 195), which has come to govern socio-ecological challenges by “command and control” (see the article by Bulkeley in this special issue). Instead of top-down governance, experimental governance implies shifting “the scholarly and political attention ‘beyond the state’” (Bulkeley et al. 2015, 3, emphasis added; see also Geels 2019) and toward political participation outside of the designated areas of political authority (Bulkeley and Schroeder 2012, 745) to form “transformative coalitions” across multiple agents (Geels 2019, 195). One motivation for going beyond “governing conducted by public authorities” is to “trouble any a priori division between the public and the private” in light of “non-state entities” that also come to do the work of governing in the public interest (Bulkeley 2016, 133).

Critical of calls for greater political decisiveness in light of urgency, calls that proponents of experimental governance have come to associate with problematic endorsements of “sovereign power” (Bulkeley 2016, 73) or “absolutism” (Meyer 2023), experimental governance locates change by political decisions at a more micro-political scale, that is, at a distance to foci on (local) state-driven policy- and law-making. Harriet Bulkeley (2016), for instance, endorses a broad view on change by political decisions and situates the latter anywhere where concrete answers are given to why, how, by whom, and with what consequence climate change is governed (see also Newell et al. 2012). Frank Geels (2019), another proponent of experimental climate governance, suggests that political decisions are made whenever an experiment moves from a protected niche to the mainstream or fails to do so. Thus, from the perspective of experimental governance, transformative change does not forcibly hinge on collectively binding, political decisions but may also be an effect of micro-politics. Some even suggest that we move beyond trusting in transformative change by political decisions toward the fostering of indeterminacy (Hutter and Farías 2017). From this vantage point, actors who improvise new sets of rules, come up with makeshift value criteria, and are able to adapt both rules and values to the very unfolding of a situation (see the article by Bulkeley in this special issue) may in fact be the key drivers of a socio-ecological transformation, a transformation of which the endorsement of a “city of permanent experiments” (Karvonen 2018, 201) is a prime example.

As already mentioned, what these meanings and promises attached to experimentation as an approach (and academic advocacies of the latter) point to, is an “emancipation” from modernist commitments for governing nature-society relations (Taylor 1999; Scott 1998; Berman 2010). Modernist approaches to governing tend to consider (positivistic) science as key to political decision-making (Bevir 2016); to regard (scientific) experts and the state as central drivers of change (Scott 1998; Bevir 2016); to perceive of environmental challenges as external to human nature and real-life contexts, and, relatedly, to regard nature as controllable by humans (Cooper 2016; Berman 2010); to believe in the ability to “solve” societal challenges by means of (allegedly universal) metrics and calculations (Scott 1998); to trust in the compatibility of economic growth (driven by techno-scientific innovation) and environmental protection—a key feature of eco-modernist governance (Machin 2019; Mol and Spaargaren 2000); to conceive of sovereign power as central to dealing with pressing challenges (Lehtinen and Brunila 2021), and to regard its exercise via the state or a (self-declared) vanguard as legitimate if it serves to secure an existing order or to create an allegedly better one (Philpott 2020; Chowdhury and Duvall 2014).

Although convinced of the critique of modernist approaches to governing societal challenges, proponents of experimental governance tend to imply a close relationship between modernist governing and governing by public authority, top-down procedures and by collectively binding, political decisions as if these components of governing through government were bound to be incompatible with contingency, uncertainty, context-sensitivity, or pluralism. While this article acknowledges that experimental governance’s emancipation from modernist governance does potentially pave the way toward novel and more promising ways of governing, it suggests that the type of emancipation that is pursued seems to throw the baby out with the bathwater. It does so by sidelining conceptualizations of public authority, top-down governance, and change by political decisions that are in fact compatible with the promises of experimentation.

The sidelining of governing (also) through government occurs in academic accounts that endorse experimental climate governance. It also manifests itself empirically. In fact, how adequate climate governance is reconceived of by academic trends (or hypes) seems to have an impact on traditional institutions such as city governments and how they govern socio-ecological challenges (see Davidson et al. 2019, 3542). This appears to also be the case with a view to the city of Vienna’s climate-governance strategy.

Certainly, a (local) government’s “going experimental” may mean capitalizing on the promises and potentials of experimentation. Yet, it may also mean serving as a license for a (local) government’s liberation from responsibility by presenting itself as one agent among many (as opposed to a specific one entrusted with public tasks and duties) and by seeking to avoid top down-governance and change by political decisions (to not appear “traditional,” anti-democratic, or even authoritarian). The latter seems to be the case in the context of Vienna’s climate strategy, an approach that involves the “responsibilization” of a wide array of agents and the fostering of a plethora of local interventions in loose connection with—or even at a deliberate distance from—already set political objectives such as concrete greenhouse gas-reduction goals³ which arguably creates a concrete manifestation of organized irresponsibility.

Experimental climate governance in Vienna

The city of Vienna presents itself as a Klima-Musterstadt (Model Climate City). As a member of the Global Covenant of Mayors for Climate and Energy, municipal leaders express a commitment to “delivering action at the pace that science dictates, in a joint effort to keep global temperature rise below 1.5°C” (CMCE-E 2021) and to seek to do so by “going experimental.” This section explains what “going experimental” means in the Viennese context and how it is argued for and framed in the city’s climate strategy. From the standpoint of this article, the case—experimental climate governance in Vienna—is treated as a “theoretical construct” (Ragin 2009, 8), that is, as a formulation that allows for relating hypotheses and reality (Wieviorka 2009, 160).⁴ This is to say that this article, which aims at theory development, does not seek to “test” or “prove” given hypotheses,⁵ but rather aims to build and illustrate them with the help of a concrete case.⁶ To build the case, I draw on documents pertaining to the city’s climate-governance strategy; four expert interviews with city officials responsible for drafting, communicating, and implementing the climate strategy on a citywide basis; and the municipal website describing how the city aims to realize its CO₂-reduction goals via climate experiments.⁷

What is Vienna’s posture with respect to climate governance? Municipal officials’ approach to climate governance is framed in terms of smart city interventions, yet this emphasis differs from other prevalent understandings of the smart city by going beyond a one-sided focus on techno-scientific innovation and green growth (Butzlaff 2019; Strüver et al. 2021). The Viennese smart city strategy underscores the importance of embedding techno-scientific innovation within larger social concerns such as securing a high quality of life for all while, at the same time, drastically reducing greenhouse gas emissions and, more generally, resource use. By 2040, the city aims to be carbon neutral, to reduce per capita energy consumption by 45%, and to curtail its consumption-based ecological footprint by 40%. To reach these goals, Vienna’s government has decided to “go experimental” by fostering a wide array of testbeds, urban living labs, pilot projects, and civil society initiatives and by seeking the involvement of multiple stakeholders (citizens, private companies, for-profit and nonprofit organizations, research institutes, universities, other European cities, and various additional partners). It does so to address, as the city government puts it, its “need for help” and “knowledge deficits,” with a view to tackling climate change and, more generally, socio-ecological challenges (Magistrat der Stadt Wien 2022).

On the website detailing Vienna’s climate strategy, more than 150 interventions—past and present—are listed. Not all interventions are framed as experiments (some are established initiatives, such as the city’s repair network), but about three-quarters of them are regarded as experiments and include:

• A “pilot project” on upcycling residual waste into eco-friendly, CO₂-neutral fuels.

• A “test run” in package delivery with cargo bicycles.

• A “pilot project” on retrofitting a nineteenth century, inner-city housing block.

• An electric vehicle- and bicycle-sharing scheme in selected neighborhoods.

• A series of community-driven, urban farming initiatives intended to enhance local food provision.

• A “testbed” for context-sensitive and scalable ideas for and experiences in climate mitigation and adaptation.

• An “urban lab” that studies real-life energy-consumption data provided by over 100 households.

• A series of experiments to expand renewables and increase efficiency.

• A “place-making initiative” in a peripheral district that aims to improve the quality of public space by calming the traffic and through other means.

• A green façade project that experiments with planting prototypes and provides information for interested parties.

• A community-funded, solar power plant that is referred to as a “model” for decentralized, citizen-driven, clean energy provision (UIV n.d.).

The purpose of the interviews with city officials was to find out more about how the city’s climate strategy came about, especially its emphasis on governing climate change primarily experimentally. The respondents were also encouraged to provide an assessment of the compatibility between the proclaimed (and highly ambitious) CO₂-reduction goals and the chosen pathway. All interviewed city officials underlined that the climate strategy understood as a document—although neither legally nor morally binding (Brandtner et al. 2017, 1079)—was an achievement in itself as it has served as a lever to push city departments (Magistrate) and organizations working for the municipality to reconsider their specific field of activity from the perspective of CO₂ emissions and resource use (Interviewees 1, 2, and 3). With a view to the question of how the chosen pathway to reach the reduction goals came about, two answers were prominent. On one hand, the respondents underlined that the experimental approach to governing climate change came about because, as Interviewee 3 explained, it allowed the city to present and showcase not only new, but also already existing socio-ecological interventions and to thereby demonstrate its long-standing proactivity on tackling socio-ecological challenges. On the other hand, “going experimental” was explained by the need for a changed role of the (local) state in governing, namely toward one that leaves “traditional understandings of the state” behind (Interviewee 1). As related by a key member of the municipal administration responsible for the Smart City Strategy,

The main task of us bureaucrats and politicians is to simply create and structure framework conditions in such a way that people who want to act sustainably do not have to constantly swim against the current. We have to get way better at leaving behind traditional understandings of the state and move toward an understanding [of the state] that builds on involvement and subtle enabling (Interviewee 1, emphasis added).

Moving toward enabling and facilitating forms of climate governance was described as the central motive behind “going experimental” by the interviewee above who left the question of the match between governance approach and climate goals unanswered. Another driving force behind Vienna’s climate strategy did provide an answer to the question on the match between approach and goals. In contrast to the prior colleague, it was argued that the CO₂-reduction goals may not be achievable by the chosen pathway and further suggested that in light of worsening socio-ecological crises, returning to state-centric, top-down, and (more) decisive forms of governing may be unavoidable.

The hurdles are the realization…I do not see how we can reach the 2040 goals. This has to do with political courage. One has to make, most likely, top-down, uncomfortable decisions. Because we are running out of time, we’d have to simply override without second-guessing. For this reason, it is going to get dire (Interviewee 2, emphasis added).

In light of these quotes, one may conclude that governing climate change can only take one of two forms: “experimental” (understood as facilitating and enabling) or “traditional” (top-down, authoritarian). While, as implied by the climate-strategy document and Interviewee 1, it is certainly true that a public authority cannot “solve” societal challenges alone and that drawing on the expertise and collaboration of other actors is indispensable, it is also the case, as feared by Interviewee 2, that Vienna’s collaborative and primarily enabling and facilitating experimental approach to governing climate change is likely to fall short of the city’s ambitious CO₂-reduction goals. In fact, according to scientific evidence to date, Vienna’s climate goals are likely to be missed by a wide margin (Schmid 2020; Virág et al. 2022). Against this backdrop, Interviewee 2 argued for more decisive (local) state interventions, which the respondent, however, related to “overruling the people.”

Leaving aside the question of the specific form and desirability of more decisive approaches to governing climate change, it is important to note that in the Viennese context, more decisive interventions would—in principle—be possible. Why? In contrast to other local states, the city has resisted—or rather circumvented—the neoliberal dismantling that elsewhere has left an “institutional void” (Hajer 2003, 175), a vacuum that makes multi-stakeholder, local context-specific, experimental governance often not only a desirable, but a necessary form of governing (see the article by Bulkeley in this special issue)—one without alternatives. In Vienna, however, the city represents a public authority that continues to be well equipped with legal powers (it constitutes a capital city and a Bundesland (a province)), political powers (it has been governed by the majoritarian Social Democratic party for more than 100 years), and, more generally, steering powers (it holds shares in or is even the majoritarian owner of more than 265 intermediary institutions) (Brandtner et al. 2017, 1081). In policy areas such as housing, the city is actually not at all shy of governing (also) through government to counterbalance market logics by, among other means, securing and providing public housing (Haderer 2023). In fact, in Vienna’s climate strategy the decarbonization of the housing sector is earmarked as one key area of intervention on the route toward becoming CO₂ neutral by 2040. As the owner of 25% of Vienna’s housing stock, the city could indeed play a leading role. Yet so far, it has not capitalized on this capacity and focuses instead on highly local, often experimental and short-lived interventions.

It is against this—also empirical—backdrop that this article suggests that the experimental turn in ecopolitics may open the door to a local government’s liberation from responsibility for governing climate change and to organized irresponsibility. This liberation, I argue, seems to be abetted by the sidelining role of public authorities in governing climate change, the discrediting of top-down governance, and the sidestepping of change by collectively binding political decisions as “traditional forms of governing” to be overcome—a sidelining, discrediting, and sidestepping that shapes academic, pro-experimentation discourses and actual climate-governance approaches. The thrust of my critique is, however, not to simply rehabilitate “traditional forms of governing,” that is, state-centric, top-down (if need be, at a distance to the governed), and decisive (understood as shaped by a “whatever it takes”-logic to tackle a given challenge) as Interviewee 2 implies, and as proponents of experimental governance tend to suspect, whenever the experimental turn is subjected to critique (see the articles by Bulkeley and Meyer in this special issue). I aim at keeping the baby (public authority, top-down governance, change by political decision) in the bathwater by underscoring that there are ways of conceiving of governing (also) through government that are compatible with the promises of experimentation. This is the focus of the next section.

Revamping governing also through government

As explained so far, experimentation may figure as liberation or “emancipation” from top-down, expert-driven, technocratic, rationalistic, ends-fixated, disembedded approaches to governing climate change. At the same time, it may also figure as a government’s liberation from responsibility that ushers in organized irresponsibility with a view to tackling socio-ecological crises. Emancipation, when thinking about it dialectically (Blühdorn et al. 2022), is a double-edged sword. It implies accepting and engaging with the possibility that a given phenomenon, such as “the rise of experimentation” (Bulkeley 2021, 272) in ecopolitics, may serve as a “midwife” of (more) promising practices and conceptualizations of climate governance and simultaneously as a “gravedigger” for such forms and understandings (Blühdorn et al. 2022, 13). This section briefly recaps how academic endorsements of experimentation and concrete governance contexts (that of the city of Vienna) sideline the role of public authority, top-down governance, and change by political decisions in governing climate change. It also offers concrete ways of rethinking each component of governing through government in ways that are compatible with demands to pay greater attention to contingency, complexity, uncertainty, and multiplicity.

Rethinking public authority as a key and specific agent of change

Critical of a “reductive dichotomy of public/private and state/non-state” (Bulkeley and Schroeder 2012, 744) and of “traditional forms of government” (Interviewee 1), proponents of experimental governance tend to stress the need to go beyond the state and toward the engagement of a multiplicity of agents. As mentioned above, change through “transformative coalitions” across multiple agents (Geels 2019, 195; Bulkeley 2016), including private ones, is writ large in experimental governance. At the same time, bringing in and “responsibilizing” a multiplicity of agents and blurring the line between the private and the public for tackling climate change may also serve as a license for a government’s liberation from responsibility. This seems to be the case in the city of Vienna, a public authority that continues to be well equipped with steering powers but hardly brings them into position with a view to governing climate change. Against this backdrop, one may make the case for keeping agents of change at least analytically distinct according to their specific (political and/or legal) mandates and accountable based on them. A specific obligation of public authorities in constitutional democracies is to tend to, shape, govern, and make decisions in the name of the res publica. While other agents of change such as private companies or social movements are also in a position to shape and serve the public interest, governing in the name of the always contested and contestable res publica is, at least formally, the key task and responsibility of a public authority. The “rise of experimentation” (Bulkeley 2021, 272) seems to have chipped away at such an understanding of public authority, a narrowing that is also observable in neoliberal contexts.

Without suggesting that experimental (climate) governance equals neoliberal governance, there are family resemblances.⁸ Hence, some critiques of neoliberalism may also serve as critiques of experimentation. As underlined by the political theorist Bonnie Honig, neoliberalism often foregrounds political narratives of “fluidity” and “object impermanence,” a foregrounding also commonly put in the service of “going beyond” governing by public authority in climate governance, as public authority is depicted as rigid and incapable with delivering solutions that work in the concrete (Bulkeley 2016, 102–127). Yet, as Honig (2017, 8) stresses, overemphasizing fluidity and object impermanence may also run a risk: the risk that collective political goals may boil down to a “ghostly disappointment that never quite materializes into something real.” Against this backdrop, Honig (2017, 16) makes the case for restrengthening “public things,”res publica, of which public authorities may be regarded as one example. They, as one may argue, embody a “public thing” (as they are accountable to citizens) and they are responsible for “public things” (including the delineation and actualization of political goals). From Honig’s perspective the key characteristic of public things is that they “gather” people together as citizens. This may occur in light of a given challenge, such as climate change and by embarking on a collective (and not only particular) effort to tackle such a problem. Rethinking public authority as a specific and key agent of change in this sense (and as opposed to one agent of change among many) has nothing to do with suggesting that it is the only legitimate change agent. In times of an (over)emphasis on fluidity, object impermanence and, as one might add, indeterminacy in which common grounds, concerns, and collective political goals, including climate goals, not only may—but too often do—boil down to a “ghostly disappointment that never quite materializes into something real” (Honig 2017, 8), we can rethink public authority as an agent of change that foregrounds common grounds, public concerns, and collective political goals not ignorant of but despite the contingency, uncertainty, complexity, or multiplicity of challenges and responses to them.

Rethinking top-down governance as compatible with democratic values

Public authority as a key agent of change has taken a backseat in experimental climate governance and the same applies to top-down governing as one specific form of governing. “Vanguardist attitudes,” as David Graeber (2003) argues and John Meyer (2023) emphasizes in his contribution to this special issue, are so deeply ingrained in academic radicalism that “it’s hard to say what it would mean to think outside.” The same seems to apply to top-down governance, a type of governing that has, for better and worse, been subject to a long list of disavowals, including disavowals in the context of praise for experimental governance. As mentioned above, some frame top-down governance as detached from local, place-based life-worlds (Meyer 2015; Schlosberg 2019) as prone to fall prey to socio-ecological change through expert-driven, techno-scientific innovation while others characterize it as elitist and anti-democratic (Eckersley 2021). Others still depict it as ignorant of the actual relational nature of any form of governance (see the articles by Bulkeley and Exner and Strüver in this special issue). To not be associated with such “traditional” forms of governing, that is, modernist (including sovereigntist) forms (Interviewee 1), the city of Vienna, as has also been mentioned above, distances itself from top-down governance vis-à-vis the challenge of climate change and goes collaborative, participatory, and experimental instead. Yet is top-down government bound to be “bad,” as the disavowals suggest?

The “rise of experimentation” (Bulkeley 2021, 272) clearly embodies an emancipation from the focus on political steering and deciding by government that is central to modernist takes on governing. Yet akin to how the above-discussed blurring of boundaries between agents of change and an overemphasis on fluidity may usher in a lack of understanding for public authority and its specific mandates, supplanting top-down governance with collaborative, enabling, and facilitating forms of governing ignores that one may make the case for top-down governance at a distance to modernist logics. In republican political theory, for instance, top-down governance is not antithetical to (individual) freedom as especially (neo)liberals tend to suggest based on their conception of freedom as noninterference (Pettit 2003a, 2003b; Lovett 2018). It is also not bound to take modernist forms, assertive of scientific truth or unchecked state power. Political theory may help us to rethink public authority (see above) and it may also assist us to reconsider top-down governance.

Republican political thought—as any tradition of political thought—comes in various forms.⁹ It stresses decentralization, deliberation, participation, and the establishment as well as the assertion of common grounds and binding rules by the government, for example, in the form of public policy and law. From a republican perspective, top-down governing is not antithetical to freedom (which is key to republicans who understand freedom as freedom from arbitrary domination) but conditional to it. Thus, republican theory stresses and asserts, among others, the need of government intervention in order to realize agreed-upon political goals and ends: goals and ends that may even warrant “forcing” someone to be free (Rousseau [1762] 2019), that is, compelling someone to live by the laws one has consented to (explicitly or tacitly), even if they stand in the way of given private whims and particular ends. As famously put by the English judge and politician William Blackstone: “[L]aws, when prudently framed, are by no means subversive but rather introductive of liberty” and thus “where there is no law, there is no freedom” (Blackstone [1765] 1979, 122).

It can be argued that accomplishing climate governance—for instance through CO₂ reductions—differs from securing political freedom which is the key focus of republican political theory. While this may be true, I assert that two key insights from republican theory are transferable to other political contexts. First, neither law nor the enforcement of it are bound to be antithetical to (individual) freedom but may be regarded as conditional to it—provided that the political end itself has not been stipulated by the few (e.g., experts or a self-declared vanguard) but agreed to by the many. Second, while attentiveness to local context, participation, complexity, and pluralism is important from a republican theory perspective, also important is zooming out from the local and the particular—including private whims and particular interests—in order to actualize collective goals. Top-down governance may be key to the latter.

Rethinking political decisions as key mode of change

To not take advantage of “traditional forms of government” (Interviewee 1), among them top-down governance, is brought forward as an argument for “going experimental.” Top-down governance has also come to be associated with sovereigntist takes on political decision-making, a “ruling through” by the state at a distance to the governed (Interviewee 2). This type of decision-making is to be sidestepped by more local, embedded, participatory forms of decision-making that are not limited to institutional politics that figure anywhere where answers are given to the question of accomplishing climate change for whom, by whom, and by what means (Bulkeley 2016; Geels 2019). Yet, as Savini and Bertolini 2019, 837) remark, is the specter of sovereigntist decision-making reason enough to primarily focus on change through experimentation and, relatedly, more micro-political and often hidden forms of political decision-making?

To be sure, circumventing overt and collectively binding political decision-making on the issue of climate change by rolling out experiments in socio-ecological change, as the city of Vienna does, may make for less conflict. At the same time, focusing primarily on experimentation may result in an endless postponing of the creation of new, more climate-friendly path dependencies. Only through decision, Flatscher and Pistrol (2021) argue with reference to the French philosopher Jacques Derrida (1990), the future can begin—despite its undecidability and, as one may add, contingency, complexity, and multiplicity. From a Derridean point of view, the fact that any judgment is bound to remain imperfect (that it cannot consider all points of view) and contingent (that there are no ultimate, universally valid rationales to decide by) is hardly an argument against collectively binding (political) decisions, as proponents of experimentation tend to suggest. What imperfection and contingency does imply is acknowledging that any decision is subject to contestation and revision (Critchley 2012).

Change through political decision, in distinction from change through experimentation, involves the elimination of possibilities and choices (Hausknost 2014), a prerequisite for the creation of new path dependencies as opposed to merely altering existing ones. Creating new path dependencies may, of course, be informed by insights from experiments. The point is, however, to transform the possible into new realities and political decision-making is one key lever for doing so, a way of shaping the world not ignorant but cognizant of uncertainty, contingency, complexity, and pluralism. For the political theorist Hannah Arendt, decision-making—judgment, as she calls it—is the core activity of politics (Arendt 1992; see also Haderer 2022); democratic politics, that, in contrast to sovereigntist or modernist politics, neither operates on the “false belief” of certainty (Meyer 2023) nor falls victim to endless explorations of the possible and the fostering only of indeterminacy.

Conclusion

That “going experimental” with a view to governing climate change, a type of climate governance that has become prominent in the last decade and is commonly accompanied by boosterish language, is not “always good or always transformative” (Savini and Bertolini 2019, 837) has been the main thrust of this article. Experimental governance, to be clear, embodies an important move beyond modernist approaches to govern societal crises. These approaches are shaped by beliefs in “problem solving” through expert-informed, top-down governance and decision-making; central state-driven, one-size-fits-all, end-of-the-pipe solutions; or the compatibility of economic growth (through techno-scientific innovation) and environmental protection. Modernist governance has often failed in the past and keeps failing in the present. Experimental governance seeks to redress these disappointments by better engaging with the contingency, complexity, uncertainty, context-dependency, and pluralism of social relations, including socio-ecological ones. It does so by emphasizing or “promising” change through experiments that are participatory, reflexive, adaptive, context-sensitive, open to learning by surprise, and attuned to the pluralist nature of societal challenges and answers to them. And yet, as I have argued, the “emancipation” of experimental governance from modernist forms of governing nature-society relations does not only serve as a “midwife” for more promising ways of governing nature-society relations, but also as a “gravedigger” of such forms (Blühdorn et al. 2022, 13).

Based on a critical engagement with academic endorsements of experimental climate governance and illustrated through a concrete case of the city of Vienna’s climate-governance approach, the article has identified and problematized three common implications of the experimental turn: the sidelining of public authority as a key and specific agent of change, the discrediting of top-down governance as undemocratic or even as authoritarian, and the sidestepping of change by collectively binding political decisions as if these levers and modes of change—altogether key components of governing (also) through government—were antithetical to the contingent, complex, uncertain, context-shaped, and pluralist nature of socio-ecological relations. These implications also come with a risk: the risk of serving as a license for a (local) government’s liberation from responsibility for governing climate change by “responsibilizing” a wide array of agents of change for tackling climate change and by fostering manifold socio-ecological experiments without accounting for how particular pursuits contribute to the actualization of larger, agreed-upon political goals such as concrete CO₂ reduction. Thus, under some circumstances, experimental governance may boil down to a form of organized irresponsibility. Both the liberation from responsibility and organized irresponsibility have been illustrated by the city of Vienna’s climate strategy, the strategy of a public authority that continues to be equipped with relatively strong steering powers and a wide scope of action but has opted against capitalizing on them in favor of less binding, experimental interventions.

Against this conceptual and empirical backdrop, the article has argued for reconceiving of public authority, top-down governance, and change by political decision—for revamping governing (also) through government—in ways that take neither modernist forms nor compromise the promises of experimentation. It has done so by drawing on democratic and republican political theory.

This article, to be clear, is not strictly endorsing anti-experimental approaches to governing climate change. It acknowledges that experimentation may be the way to go in situations where finding “solutions” through deliberation and consent boils down to an unproductive “talking shop.” It also acknowledges that experiencing changed socio-ecological relations in a concrete context, a concrete experiment, may certainly “educate desire” for specific or different nature-society relations (Levitas 2011, 123). In this sense, this article operates at a distance to Ingolfur Blühdorn’s framing of especially civil-society driven, experimental politics as recreational experientialism (see Blühdorn 2023 in this special issue) that sustains rather than transforms the unsustainable. Any experience, including a recreational one, may educate desire (in whatever direction). This article is also not naively pro-state, as the endorsement of change through public authority, top-governance, and collectively binding political decisions may suggest. Certainly, consistent with Robyn Eckersley (2021), this article is driven by the conviction that (local) “states can do a great deal to facilitate societal transformations”—a perspective endorsed by the currently blossoming literature on the relevance of a state-shaped, foundational economy for a transition to more sustainable nature-society relations (Arcidiacono et al. 2022; Bärnthaler et al. 2020). In light of the recent and often quite optimistic “return of the state” literature (Haggart et al. 2021; Patrick 2021), the key question that lingers is what kind of (local) state returns. Given current frustrations with experimental ecopolitics, some (re)appeal to the return of Leviathan (see, among others, Weibust, 2016; Interviewee 2), that is, a modernist, especially sovereigntist, state. Operating at a distance to such petitions, this article has sought to foreground ways of thinking about public authority, top-down governance, and change by political decision at a distance to modernist logics and in proximity to the promises of experimentation—in an attempt to keep the baby—government (also) through government—in the bathwater.

Acknowledgements

The referenced interviews were prepared and conducted together with Hauke Dannemann (WU Vienna) and Karoline Kalke (WU Vienna), whom I would like to thank. My appreciation also to the two anonymous reviewers for their close engagement with and highly valuable feedback on a previous version of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

The research for and publication of this article was supported and funded by the Austrian Science Fund FWF [Project number: P31226].

Notes

1 In this article, the term “modernist” is used as a qualifier for a specific approach to governing that has been widespread in modern, especially “high modern” societies in the global North (e.g., societies during the Cold War). It is a term I take from authoritative publications in political and social theory such as the work of James Scott (1998), Marshall Berman (2010), and Peter Taylor (1999). “Modernist” forms of governing encompass eco-modernist approaches to socio-ecological challenges (approaches well-known and critically debated in ecopolitical contexts), but modernist takes on governing are neither limited to the specificities of eco-modernism nor to the field of environmental politics. They go beyond both and are, more fundamentally, characterized by specific ways of conceiving of ontologies concerning the relationship between science and politics, the government and the governed, technological progress and human progress, and so forth.

2 The term “organized irresponsibility” was initially used by Ulrich Beck (1988) in one of his writings on risk society to denote a gap between the causation of harms and the ascription of injuries. In the context of this article, I use the term in a different way (see above).

3 Climate goals are, of course, more encompassing than greenhouse gas reduction goals. Yet reducing CO₂-emission is a key component of mitigating climate change, a mitigation goal to which many players, including cities, have committed - a commitment this article operates with and reflects on critically.

4 The case constituted one unit of analysis among others in a three-year research project on the experimental turn in environmental politics.

5 “Testing” or “proving” hypotheses/conceptual arguments would require a different type of approach to a case study, one that treats a case as an “empirical unit” to be understood in itself (Ragin 2009, 8; see also Yin 2014). Drawing on a case to illustrate conceptual arguments comes with risks, namely, that the case is “read” through a conceptual lens. The point of this article is to shift and challenge (dominant) ways of conceiving experimental governance in light of a concrete risk which was encountered not only in academic writings, but also on an engagement with a concrete climate-governance strategy.

6 As is the case with any approach to a case study, there are limitations to drawing on a case as a “theoretical construct,” namely that the case’s lessons may be framed in ways that affirm given hypotheses/conceptual concerns. Clearly, the main thrust of this article is conceptual. At the same time, the identified and problematized implications and risks do not only shape conceptualizations of experimental climate governance, but can be also found empirically. In fact, in the context of the research for this article, it was the expert interviews that made me think more critically about academic endorsements of experimental climate governance. Drawing on a case for the purpose of illustrating why a more critical perspective on experimental governance may be warranted does not imply that an in-depth engagement with a case and the data underpinning it is irrelevant. To the contrary, such an engagement may be carried out in a subsequent study, one that treats a case as an “empirical” unit.

7 The four city officials worked in leading positions in sustainability, planning, and communications and were drivers behind Vienna’s climate strategy. They were bureaucrats, not politicians. The interviews which lasted for about an hour were conducted in 2020 and are archived at the Institute for Social Change and Sustainability (IGN) at the Vienna University of Economics and Business.

8 The article acknowledges that the experimental turn may boil down to neoliberal governance (see, among others, the article by Exner and Strüver in this special issue or Torrens and von Wirth 2021). That said, a given governance innovation, such as the turn toward the experimental, can hardly be “blamed” for appropriations, for example, by dominant, neoliberal forms of governing. Suggesting so would imply conflating given social norms (“what is”) and ideals (“what should/could be”)—a key conceptual distinction. 

9 For instance, common good-oriented variants of republicanism and variants of republicanism that are appealed to for instrumental reasons (Lovett 2018).