Overcoming the Experimental Governance Gap: Intermediaries as Catalysts for Urban Climate Experiments and the Politics of Inequality

Urban environmental interventions are increasingly implemented through experimental approaches, including pilots, trials, and urban climate experiments (UCEs). While such interventions are often framed as innovative tools for advancing sustainability, growing scholarship has raised concerns regarding their uneven social implications, prompting a central question: do urban environmental interventions function as drivers of equality or as engines of inequality? Existing research has primarily addressed this question by focusing on distributive outcomes, examining who benefits from interventions and who bears their costs. This paper shifts attention upstream, arguing that equality and inequality are shaped not only by outcomes, but by the governance arrangements through which experimental interventions are designed and implemented. The paper introduces the concept of the Experimental Governance Gap to capture recurring challenges that municipalities face when implementing UCEs. These challenges include limited innovation capacity, weak feedback mechanisms, fragmented knowledge transfer, and insufficient public participation. Notably, such governance gaps tend to disproportionately affect marginalized communities, whose access to decision-making processes, technical knowledge, and institutional channels of influence is often constrained. Yet despite these limitations, cities continue to pursue experimental environmental interventions, suggesting the presence of compensatory governance mechanisms that enable experimentation to proceed. Building on regulatory governance literature and the Regulator–Intermediary–Target (RIT) model (Abbott et al., 2017), the paper focuses on intermediaries as key actors operating between municipalities and target populations. Intermediaries include non-governmental organizations, research institutes, private firms, and hybrid organizations that are delegated responsibilities in the design and implementation of urban environmental experiments. Rather than treating intermediaries as neutral or purely technical facilitators, the paper conceptualizes them as governance actors whose practices actively shape participation, knowledge circulation, and the distribution of voice within experimental processes. Empirically, the paper adopts a comparative research design examining urban climate experiments in four European cities: Berlin, Copenhagen, Barcelona, and Amsterdam, selected to reflect diverse governance contexts. The study combines systematic document analysis with planned semi-structured interviews with municipal officials, intermediaries, and affected communities. Analytically, the paper advances the argument that intermediary functions, facilitating innovation, providing feedback to policymakers, brokering knowledge between expert and local actors, and enabling public participation, constitute critical sites where questions of equality and inequality are negotiated. Depending on how intermediaries are selected, mandated, and held accountable, these functions may either mitigate existing inequalities by broadening access and representation or reproduce them by privileging well-resourced actors and technocratic forms of governance. By foregrounding intermediaries as political actors within experimental governance, the paper contributes to debates on urban environmental interventions, experimental policymaking, and social inequality, offering an analytical framework for assessing when and how experimental approaches are more likely to advance, or undermine, urban equality.