Speaker
Description
In the face of pressing social and environmental challenges, experimental interventions – such as real-world laboratories, urban living labs, niche experiments and demonstration projects – are increasingly being recognised as important drivers of transformative urban change. In particular, experiments with co-creative governance are expected to trigger learning processes that challenge inflexible administrative structures by promoting adaptable and solution-oriented strategies.
Although learning is considered a central component of these urban experiments, it is rarely explicitly and systematically investigated in the scientific literature. There is a large discrepancy between studies that focus on urban experiments and those that explicitly address the learning processes in these experiments.
Addressing this research gap, the paper uses the example of the Vienna Climate Team (Wiener Klimateam) – an innovative governance experiment for the co-productive development of climate-relevant projects – to examine how the process design and project structure of an experimental process influence different forms of learning at different levels. The Vienna Climate Team is characterised by the active involvement of different actors, from municipal departments and districts to political decision-makers and citizens and has explicitly placed the promotion of learning processes at the centre.
Methodologically, the research is based on a qualitative case study that includes document analysis, participant observation and focus interviews with institutional actors involved in the experiment. To capture the multi-layered learning processes in the context of urban governance experiments, the study draws on theoretical concepts of social learning, transformative learning, organisational learning and process learning.
The results show that learning processes manifest themselves differently depending on the design of the experimental arrangements in various phases of the process. The study highlights various learning arenas that were created by the specific structure of the Vienna Climate Team and analyses their influence on individual and collective learning processes. The analysis identifies three central learning strands: learning collaborative decision-making, transdisciplinary co-productive collaboration and communication, and internal administrative learning processes and institutional change.
Based on the insights gained, concrete tactics for the effective design and implementation of co-creative governance experiments are derived. The proposed analysis will not only advance the theoretical discussion of learning in experimental governance approaches, but also provide practical insights for the design of urban transformation processes. It emphasises the importance of consciously and systematically integrating learning processes into the design and implementation of urban governance experiments and contributes to the further development of the theoretical discussion on learning in experimental governance approaches.
| Keywords | Urban Governance; Experiments; Learning |
|---|---|
| Best Congress Paper Award | No |
