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Research and innovation policies (IPs) across Europe, particularly in Sweden, are increasingly framed by an orientation towards societal challenges, missions, and transformative change. Innovation-funding agencies are adapting to these new approaches but struggle with a host of new questions and challenges on how to re-structure public policy interventions and develop new structures for monitoring, learning, and evaluation. In this article, we investigate how this IP paradigm shift is dealt with in the IP discourse and practice in Sweden and how an incomplete shift creates mismatches and tensions with existing structures for programme evaluation and monitoring. Despite the new paradigm, the implementation of evaluation strategies mostly follows a traditional ‘summative’ framing. The ongoing discussions in Swedish IP demonstrate that a paradigm shift towards transformative innovation cannot unfold its potential unless it is also followed by a shift in the practices of programme implementation and evaluation.

Due to a spatial turn in the socio-technical transition literature, the geography of energy transitions has recently been taken increasingly seriously, leading to burgeoning research output on regional energy transitions since early 2010. Amidst this wealth of publications, however, it can be difficult to keep track of its diverse and constantly evolving landscape. This editorial therefore aims at developing a framework that allows for bringing multiple approaches to regional energy transitions into conversation with each other and that helps to understand and explain the complexity of these interdependencies in ways that go beyond observing regional variety in energy transitions.

Climate change is one of the most challenging environmental and social problems for contemporary urban planning. In response to this phenomenon, city networks have emerged as new configurations of urban climate governance that encourage the implementation of experiments such as testing new solutions regarding sustainable transport. While city networks are gaining momentum and influence as effective platforms to transform and scale up pilot experiments into city-wide schemes, little is known regarding their role in conditioning and leveraging such urban experiments Our paper investigates the underexplored nature of urban experiments within city networks and provides a better understanding of how these networks condition urban experiments. To this end an analytical model has been developed and applied to the case of the C40 Climate Leadership Group (C40) and itsClimate Positive Development Good Practice Guide.Our findings suggest that the C40 encourages variation in local climate experiments and the generation of new and innovative climate solutions in member cities. In particular they reveal that the implementation of climate positive experiments has passed the ‘variation’ stage, is currently in the ‘selection’ stage, and likely to move towards the ‘retention’ stage in the near future. Potential experimentation outputs of the case are identified as built environment change, new citizen practices, policy change, infrastructural change and new technology. Noticeably, we consider that the C40 plays an important role in providing fundamental institutional support to implement and leverage climate projects within its member cities.

Established urban policy and planning approaches are ill-equipped to deal with the wicked nature of urban resilience problems and challenges. To break down bureaucratic silos and foster transformative change, ‘governance experiments’ are heralded as promising platforms for testing new ways of collaboration and urban innovation. This paper introduces an analytical framework to unpack the organizational principles and institutional structures of governance experimentation. It applies this framework on urban resilience actions in Melbourne as part of the Rockefeller 100 Resilient Cities Network. The case studies illustrate that governance experimentation requires active stakeholder and boundary management and acceptance to learn from failure.

In the last decade, there has been a marked growth in formalised city networks. City networks of late have transcended beyond municipal collaborations towards more complex networked governance arrangements. City networks are noted also to raise the level of ambition among cities learning from and competing with each other with regard to the deployment of low-carbon technologies and policies. Over the last two decades, at least nine urban climate networks have been established around the world. This article consolidates the academic literature on C40 within the context of three key themes that are drawn upon from earlier work of Davidson et al. with the goal of drawing out the key implications of researching, and putting into practice, urban studies in an age of increasingly networked urban governance and the role of city networks. We conclude the paper with articulating a new research agenda that places a focus on the effects of city networks on institutional relevance of traditional planning in ways that have not yet been considered in practice and scholarship. We argue a key challenge is to align and potentially synthesise these traditional and new forms of city shaping in an urban age era of rapidly unfolding endangerment.

The responses by Acuto, Frantzeskaki, Gordon & Johnson, Pinault and Smeds all draw attention to the need to situate C40 in a wider political and economic context. Global city networks such as C40 facilitate, orchestrate, test and diffuse critical innovations for urban climate action through processes of experimentation. How these processes of on-the-ground experimentation in networked cities relate to global climate action and governance remains however poorly understood. Further research is needed to disclose and unpack the hidden politics, knowledge dynamics and institutional reconfigurations of such experiments curtailed by seemingly inclusive but rather opaque concepts such as living labs, co-creation and co-production.

More and more cities are developing strategies and implementing actions to increase their resilience to a diversity of environmental, social and economic challenges. International networks such as 100 Resilient Cities, established by the Rockefeller Foundation, are supporting cities to find and implement solutions to ‘shocks and stresses.’ This new approach to urban governance, often initiated by philanthropic organizations, is debated. On the one hand, these initiatives are celebrated as catalysts for transformational change through ‘collaboration’ and ‘co-design’ in contexts such as mobility, energy, green space or housing. On the other hand, urban resilience initiatives have been criticized for prioritizing private sector agendas and top-down approaches and hollowing out public sector tasks and democratic participation. However, little is known how urban resilience strategies are actually implemented in practice. Embedded action research on the implementation of the Resilient Melbourne strategy provides the opportunity to have a closer look at this highly contested topic. This paper provides first insights into the research project Urban Resilience in Action, using the Resilient Melbourne strategy to assess the implementation of selected actions. It shows that a reconceptualization and new analytical dimensions are needed to understand urban resilience as an urban innovation strategy.

This paper empirically explores if and how the spatial dimensions of Technological Innovation System matter using the case of offshore wind in North-Western Europe. In particular, it demonstrates the territory-specific institutional embeddedness and transnational linkages effects between four national offshore wind innovation systems. The paper discusses the consequences of taking these spatial dimensions into account in the analysis of the domestic TIS performance. It argues that the acknowledgement of these dimensions contributes to better understanding of the systems' dynamics and leads to policy advice that is in sync with recent internationalisation developments in the diffusion of the offshore wind industry.