Considering Experimentalist Governance for the Energy Transition: Changing Power Relations in Evidence-Based Policy-Making

This paper considers the use of experimentalist governance for accelerating the energy transition. Experimentalism is ideal-typically characterised by a recursive cycle of i. cooperative policy formulation at the central level, ii. explicitly diverse implementation at the lower levels, iii. regular reporting on implementation efforts, successes and failures, and iv. the evaluation and reformulation of the policy goals and instruments on the basis of the reporting. All four ‘steps’ in this experimentalist cycle leave extensive room for stakeholder participation, with the aim of including expertise and empirical evidence on policy practice from a wide array of perspectives – both public and private. This governance approach is argued to be especially suited for dealing with conditions of strategic uncertainty (making actors uncertain about the development of both problem and solution), a polyarchic distribution of power, and a complex interdependence between states and between states and non-state actors such as industry and business – all which characterise the energy transition. Based on the EU Industrial Emissions Directive as a case study, the paper considers the potential of this iterative multi-level governance framework for concrete policy-making in the realm of the energy transition. The conclusion includes a discussion of potential pitfalls of close stakeholder participation in evidence-based policy-making, the changing power relations between public and private (industrial) actors, and experimentalism’s potential for the goal of an actual transition as opposed to incremental improvement.