Beyond experiments in climate governance workshop

There are some very interesting reflections here from Paula Kivimaa, Bruno Turnheim and Frans Berkhout on the ‘Beyond experiments: understanding how climate governance innovations become embedded’ INOGOV workshop which I attended at Sussex University at the end of April.

The workshop was particularly enjoyable because of the excellent group of people that Paula, Bruno and Frans had assembled to contribute to the book, and it was great to get to know several people whose work has been quite influential for me, as well as being introduced to the work of others who I hadn’t been aware of. I discussed my contribution to the workshop here, which I’m now going to refine and improve based on our discussions at the workshop, and the feedback I received from the other participants. Final chapter drafts are due at the end of August, which will hopefully lead to a reasonably quick turnaround at the publisher’s end. I think there is going to be much of interest in this collection, including some contributions with the potential to greatly impact thinking on climate governance and transitions.

Beyond experiments: conceptualising democratic innovations

I have had an abstract accepted to contribute to a COST action workshop in Brighton in April, on the topic ‘Beyond experiments: Understanding how climate governance innovations become embedded‘. The aim of the workshop is to develop an edited book, and I’m using my chapter to develop my thinking on ‘democratic innovations’, a concept around which I hope to focus my research in future. What particularly attracted me to the workshop was the emphasis on bringing together insights from science and technology studies and governance studies which is something I have been thinking about a lot. I explain how I am hoping to do this in the abstract below, and how I think a focus on democratic innovations, rather than just public participation processes for example, can lead to new insights about climate governance.

My posts on the Topograph

From 2012-2015 I maintained a joint research blog with fellow geographer and STS scholar Martin Mahony called the Topograph. As we are now working on very different projects – he has just started a British Academy fellowship project at the University of Nottingham looking at the intersections of 20th century British colonialism and meteorological science – and developing our own profiles as early career scholars we have decided to mothball the Topograph for the time being, but leave the archive intact.

Below is an archived list of my most popular posts on the Topograph on topics including organisational learning, democracy, evidence-based policy, social media, the Anthropocene, the GM controversy, and experimentation.