Director: Elin Lerum Boasson / Co-Director: Dave Huitema

WG1 focuses on the invention, initiation and emergence of new forms of policy and governance, resulting from the activities of policy entrepreneurs, innovative businesses and/or ‘leader’ states. It investigates the importance of policy entrepreneurship and leadership and other possible invention drivers, such as external ‘shock’ events and policy experiments; and aims to enhance our understanding of the relative importance of policy invention in the policy innovation cycle.

This working group aims to foster more comparative work on policy invention, across different sub-fields of climate policy (i.e. renewable energy schemes versus energy efficiency measures), across mitigation and adaptation policy, and different countries and levels of governance (local, national, regional and global).

In the first year, WG1 supported a number of lines of inquiry and networking, including:

  1. Organising a workshop in Amsterdam on policy entrepreneurship and policy innovation.
  2. Secured a Special Issue on climate governance entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship in the journal, Environment and Planning C, based on papers presented at the Amsterdam workshop.
  3. Supported a visiting fellowship, on policy entrepreneurship and ‘power with’ to scale-up innovations, at the Department of Environmental Policy Analysis, Institute for Environmental Studies (IVM), Vrije Universiteit (VU) Amsterdam.

In year 2, WG1:

  1. Ran a workshop in Leuven on experimentation and policy innovation in Emissions Trading Systems.
  2. Secured a Special Issue in Global Environmental Politics on emissions trading experiments, based on the papers presented at the Leuven workshop, and edited by Jorgen Wettestad, Katja Biedenkoft, Patrick Muller, and Peter Slominski.

In year 3 WG1 continued supporting networking and exploration along a number of lines of inquiry and:

  1. Ran a workshop in Hull on pioneers and leaders in polycentric climate governance.
  2. Preparing an edited book with Cambridge University Press based on the papers presented at the Hull workshop.
  3. Ran a workshop in Amsterdam on urban governance for mitigation and adaptation.
  4. Secured two Special Issues in the Journal of Environmental Planning and Management and the Journal of Environmental Policy and Planning based on papers presented at the Amsterdam workshop.

 

Photo credit: Missy Schmidt/Flickr