Climate governance experiments: current practices and their meta-governance embedding in Berlin’s solar energy transition

Cities are elective sites for experimenting and testing-out new technologies, infrastructures, social practices and governance arrangements in search for policy change. The article explores the relevance of experimental governance practices in climate change policy. The experimental nature of involved practices entails allowing for degrees of flexibility and the inclusion of novel actors, and highlights the searching, adaptive and open-ended nature of climate governance. Based on existing literature in transition and governance studies, the article advances a conceptualization of different models of experimentation – policy, socio-technical, strategic governance and grassroots governance experiments – that is further refined through the sensitizing concepts of uncertainty and learning and through an analysis of factors of interdependency to account for the contextual embedding of experimental actions. Grounded in the empirical context of Berlin’s transition to solar energy provision, the research analyzes three governance initiatives that are representative of the variety and simultaneity of experiments: the governmental approach of Masterplan Solarcity, the civil society cooperative of BürgerEnergie Berlin and the grassroots neighbourhood initiative of Reichenberger Kiez für alle. This contributes to a grounded and nuanced understanding of experimental governance processes and provides insights into the need for embedding diverse governance experiments in an experimental meta-governance ecology.