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International audience; Concerted action on climate change will require a continuing stream of social and technical innovations whose development and transmission will be influenced by public policies. New ways of doing things frequently emerge in innovative small-scale initiatives – ‘experiments’ – across sectors of economic and social life. These experiments are actionable expressions of novel governance and socio-technical arrangements. Mobilising and generalising the outputs of these experiments could lead to deep reductions in greenhouse gas emissions over the long-term. It is often assumed that the groundswell of socio-technical and governance experiments will ‘scale-up’ to systemic change. But the mechanisms for these wider, transformative impacts of experiments have not been fully conceptualised and explained. This paper proposes a conceptual framework for the mobilisation, generalisation and embedding of the outputs and outcomes of climate governance experiments. We describe and illustrate four ‘embedding mechanisms’ – (1) replication-proliferation; (2) expansion-consolidation; (3) challenging-reframing; and (4) circulation-anchoring – for entwined governance and socio-technical experiments. Through these mechanisms knowledge, capabilities, norms and networks developed by experiments become mobile and generic, and come to be embedded in reconfigured socio-technical and governance systems.

International audience; In this paper, we offer a comprehensive and interdisciplinary review of 'failure' in transitions research. What is meant by failure, and is the community biased against it? How is failure explained through different perspectives? How can failures be addressed more appropriately in transitions studies? We synthesize a large body of evidence spanning transitions studies, innovation studies, science and technology studies, organisation and management studies, policy studies and the history of technology to probe and sharpen these questions. We examine within these literatures the instances and possibilities of success with transitions and discuss why this may be problematic, organising our analysis around four types of bias (selection, cognitive, interpretive, and prescription). In addition, we review three 'families' of framings of failure put forward in and around the socio-technical transitions literature, notably discrete failure events, systemic failings and processual accounts of failure, and discuss how they can be constructively put to work.

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The book summarises the outcomes of the project "Assessing the potential of various instruments for sustainable consumption practices and greening of the market" (ASCEE). The scope of the ASCEE project was to consider the latest trends in policies supporting sustainable consumption and production (SCP), and to indicate key elements of policies supporting sustainable consumption. Our main research emphasis dealt with innovative instruments, approaches and practices to support sustainable consumption. The aim of ASCEE was to contribute to policy development to indicate promising innovative approaches and tools to foster sustainable consumption and to present some strategic recommendations on how to progress in this arena. The structure of the book is as follows: the book describes the challenge of sustainable consumption in Chapter 1 and presents a short overview on selected European activities. The following Chapter 2 "Innovative approaches" reports on the three themes we distinguished, and presents our findings for the examined cases, supplemented by some additional empirical findings on innovative instruments worth reporting, but not in the same level of detail as the nine cases. Our central findings are presented in chapter 3 "Empirical Insights" which highlights our findings and key messages. Chapter 4 "Assessment of instruments" is dedicated to the topic of assessment of political instruments which forms an integral part of making sustainable consumption policy. It is followed by Chapter 5 "Policy Recommendations" which introduces our key recommendations addressed to policy-makers, public authorities and stakeholders. Finally, chapter 6 "Outlook" completes the book and hints at areas linked to sustainable consumption, but not dealt with in this report, and to important R&D topics.