Multi-level learning for systemic transformation: Experiences from an expedition in North Mid Sweden

Journal article, 2024

Learning is often a component, and sometimes an explicit goal, of sustainability transition projects. Despite a growing interest in designing, facilitating, and evaluating such exploratory initiatives with respect to their systemic, less work has focused on how such initiatives support learning and capacity-building among its partaking actors and institutions including building experimental governance capacity. In this paper, we aim to better understand how exploratory and experimental initiatives with transformative sustainability ambitions relate to and influence their partaking actors and institutions. We draw from the North Mid Sweden Challenge Lab, an initiative to adapt, test and learn a governance approach to navigate complex sustainability challenges and transformations. It was part of a high impact action within a pilot for regional industrial transition framed around experiments in governance and policy by the European Commission and Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, where peer-learnings by and between regions was stated as an explicit goal. We focus on the kind of learning and knowledge creation processes that occur in these open-ended and multi-levelled social interaction processes. In this paper, we empirically engage with such learning processes with a focus on governance capacity, based on direct experiences from its participating actors and related institutions. This study builds on and extends conceptual understandings of scaling, embedding and other types of strategies and diffusion mechanisms in sustainability transformations and transitions with a focus on learning. We conclude that conducting exploratory initiatives seems to have functioned in legitimizing open-ended, cross-sectoral purposeful activities of deliberation, learning and search. However, sending out and leading explorations is not the same as preparing for and working with procedures to scale, transfer, embed and institutionalise learnings and results to alter mainstream ways of governing for complex challenges and systemic change – all key elements in developing experimental governance capacity in response to sustainability challenges.