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Experimenting our way to sustainability? Empirical evidence from Bergen and Groningen
This seminar will be held in a hybrid format. To join this seminar online, please register through this link: Register Here
Cities are increasingly employing urban experimentation to address complex sustainability challenges. Experimentation, premised on learning-by-doing, offers organizations the space to test interventions and learn from them. However, it is not clear whether and how experiments bring about organizational changes through learning. We seek to scrutinize the relationship between experimentation, learning, and organizational change, and thus ask: To what extent does learning from experimentation bring about changes in organizational practices? Drawing on the literature on urban governance and sustainability transitions in the context of experimentation and learning, we conduct a cross-case comparison of four urban logistics experiments in the cities of Bergen and Groningen. Our findings show that whilst experiments indeed generate learning, this is not sufficient to bring about organizational change. Learning from the experiments themselves needs to be coupled with persistent relational work within and between organizations, in order to turn experimentation into actual organizational change.
Biography
Subina Shrestha is a PhD Research Fellow at the Centre for Climate and Energy Transformation, University of Bergen in Norway. She is currently a visiting fellow at SPRU, University of Sussex. Her PhD is part of the CityFreight project, which maps the governance challenges of sustainable urban logistics. In her thesis, Shrestha unpacks how power relations, experimental projects and learning processes are shaping the pace and direction of sustainability transitions in urban logistics, and urban governance. Prior to her current role, she has worked in Nepal and Thailand, conducting research on energy, water and climate change policies.