Revisiting the promise of eco-political experimentation: an introduction to the Special Issue

In light of pressing challenges such as climate change, real-life, participatory, adaptive, and reflexive experimental interventions have been framed as indispensable incubators for transformative change toward greater sustainability. Yet, to what extent are the promises that were attached to eco-political experimentation around the turn to the 21st Century still plausible today? In this introduction to this Special Issue on eco-political experimentation we first map the alternative that experimentation sought to be in the fields of knowledge production, governance, and civic activism and how critics responded to this agenda. We then make the case for reassessing the promises of experimentation against the backdrop of current societal constellations. These constellations include the renewed invocation of climate science as an authority that demands political action (an authority experimental knowledge production sought to decenter) and de facto return of the state and more centralized forms of governing (which experimental governance sought to go beyond). They also include the return of forms of activism that stress the importance of urgent and decisive action (which experimental action is in part an opposite to) as well as the emergence of civil society experiments in the service of exclusion if not authoritarianism (in contrast to values inclusivity and democracy that are usually attached to eco-political experimentation). The objective of this introduction, and the articles comprising this Special Issue, is to establish a sensorium for ambiguities which we regard as a precondition for experimental action that might actually achieve transformative change as opposed to merely generating hope for it.