Director: Mikael Hildén / Co-Director: Dave Huitema
Working group 3 is assessing the effects of policy and governance innovations. It is examining the consequences – both intended and unintended – of policy innovations, to investigate how ‘new’ policies interact with established policies and policy instruments and to what extent they are more impactful than older ones. It is also evaluating non-state forms of governing.
Current assessments mostly focus on ex-ante analyses of proposed governance solutions; WG3 by contrast, is also examining them ex-post, and in relation to wider issues such as legitimacy and accountability.
In the first year, WG3 supported a number of lines of inquiry and networking, including:
- A workshop on Initiation, Experimentation and Evaluation. This built on the idea of bringing together research highlighting the role of experiments that aim at decarbonising or increasing resilience and adaptive capacity. It built new capacity by involving many early career researchers. The workshop papers will be published in special issues of Policy Sciences and Journal of Cleaner Production.
- An international conference on innovations in environmental taxation and emissions trading organized with Aarhus University. It brought together a whole suite of disciplines and policy practitioners to examine policy instruments and associated policy processes. The most important papers have been published in a book.
- An intensive workshop on assessing low carbon and smart cities jointly organized with Bocconi University and the JRC (European Commission). It advanced the debate on smart and low carbon cities in the framework of innovative climate policies, and brought together a mixture of researchers and practitioners involved in smart and low carbon city policies, as well as representatives from regional and local governments.
- Several visiting fellowships, including one on the monitoring and evaluation of EU climate policies. It resulted in blog posts and an article on the editorial page of the largest newspaper in Finland.
In Year 2, WG3:
- Hosted a workshop on enhancing legitimacy in polycentric climate governance, with EUI in Florence.
- Convened a conference with the European Environmental Evaluator’s Network in Florence, focused on climate and environment policy evaluation – ‘Supporting the road from Paris to 2050’.
- Support several visiting fellowships.
In Year 3 WG3 continued supporting a number of lines of inquiry and networking, including:
- Hosted a workshop in Utrecht on the politics and governance of negative emissions technologies. Papers from this conference are being prepared for a special issue in Global Sustainability.
In Year 4 WG3 will:
- Will host a workshop in Bordeaux on participatory climate governance.
Photo credit: Matthias Ripp/Flickr
