The societal inability to respond accurately to the ecological crisis also requires a reflection on how universities can improve the impact of their practices. This paper reports on a prize-winning experiment aiming to strengthen the interaction of the university with the world of policymaking: a mixed classroom with students and policymakers. This classroom provides an environment in which policymakers and students co-produce insights, while giving policymakers direct access to academic knowledge and helping students to reflect on the dynamics of real-world contexts. The main goal of this study is to illuminate how learning in and through a mixed classroom experiment take places, for participants, teachers and organisational actors. To do so, we reflect on the continuous dialogue between our efforts as teachers and the experience of participants and others involved. To make sense of our teaching and institutional roles in this experiment, we suggest using the concept of ‘tinkering’. Further, to conceptualise the learning dynamics in a mixed classroom, we deploy the concept of ‘boundary crossing’, which turns out to be helpful in elucidating both individual learning (‘reflection’) and organisational learning (‘transformation’). Our study indicates that the notion of boundary crossing helps to effectively capture the learning situation we created and, as such, helps to redefine more generally how the science-policy interface can be understood and acted upon. For other educators interested in deploying mixed classroom-like approaches, we suggest that a tinkering approach can only work if there is sufficient room for experimentation, including failure and reflection, as well as ample time and funding. We also suggest critically looking at the constraints of the institutional logics and dynamics of higher education (e.g. the structure of semesters) and how their connection to the institutional logics and temporal dynamics of real-world contexts may be improved.

The need for engaging citizens in climate policymaking is increasingly recognised. Despite indications that the form of expert involvement can strongly influence participatory processes, this remains scarcely researched. We analysed two unique and contrasting cases of citizen engagement in national climate mitigation policy: (1) the Irish Citizens’ Assembly (ICA), the first national climate assembly involving live expert presentations and face-to-face deliberations; and (2) the Participatory Value Evaluation (PVE) on Dutch climate policymaking, where more than 10,000 citizens compared policy options in an online environment based on expert-based information on policy effects. Taking a dramaturgical approach, we found that the opening up and closing down of policy options and perspectives was influenced by the setting, staging and scripting of expertise. Apart from providing information on policy options, experts had significant roles in design choices and formulating recommendations, which shaped citizens’ deliberations and policy advice. In deliberative processes, citizens’ deliberations can be further influenced by putting experts in a privileged spot and emphasising their authority, whereas in the setting of an online tool, experts’ design choices may be masked by the fact-like presentation of expertise. Future research should further investigate the role of experts and expertise across a wider range of practices. Nevertheless, we conclude that the high degree of required technical knowledge in climate mitigation policy naturally implies strong expert involvement, which concomitantly steers the results. Alternatively, we may search to enhance citizens’ engagement in guiding climate policymakers by focusing on citizens’ normative perspectives.

Some of the most influential explorations of low-carbon transformations are conducted with Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs). The recent attempts by the IPCC to look for pathways compatible with the 1.5 °C and 2 °C temperature goals are a case in point. Earlier scholarship indicates that model-based pathways are persuasive in bringing specific possible future alternatives into view and guiding policymaking. However, the process through which these shared imaginations of possible futures come about is not yet well understood. By closely examining the science-policy dynamics around the IPCC SR1.5, we observe a sequence of mutually legitimising interactions between modelling and policy making through which the 1.5 °C goal gradually gained traction in global climate politics. Our findings reveal a practice of ‘political calibration’, a continuous relational readjustment between modelling and the policy community. This political calibration is indicative of how modellers navigate climate politics to maintain policy relevance. However, this navigation also brings key dilemmas for modellers, between 1) requirements of the policy process and experts’ conviction of realism; 2) perceived political sensitivities and widening the range of mitigation options; and 3) circulating crisp storylines and avoiding policy-prescriptiveness. Overall, these findings call into question the political neutrality of IAMs in its current position in the science-policy interface and suggest a future orientation in which modellers aim to develop additional relations with a broader set of publics resulting in more diverse perspectives on plausible and desirable futures.

This paper investigates how the teaching and learning about “wicked” environmental problems may be fostered through an educational approach premised on futuring–the active imagination of the future. The growing academic interest in possible and desirable futures provides a promising starting point for restructuring education as coupling knowledge to imagination and teaching to policy practice can open up new, experiential ways of learning. Empirically, this paper draws upon research on an experimental futuring course employing a “mixed classroom” formula in which students and policy-makers learn together about sustainability challenges. Drawing on the notion of inquiry, this course is set up with the aim to foster a critical engagement with the ways futures are imagined in political debates and decision-making. Through complementary activities, the students were pushed to imagine possible futures around a central theme, the transition to a circular economy, in interaction with the policy-makers and other practitioners. This culminated in a “Museum of the Future”. From our action-research-based investigation of the learning experiences in the course, we conclude that a futuring approach to teaching wicked problems results in a more active attitude of students towards the space in which wicked problems and solutions are collectively imagined and deliberated.

Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs) have gained a prominent role in the climate science-policy interface. The article reconstructs the evolution of IAMs and their changing role in this interface, investigating how and why IAMs have become so prominent. Based on literature analysis, quantitative document analysis and semi-structured interviews, we describe the historic evolution of the interactions between IAMs and policy-making between 1970 and 2015. We identify five historic phases in which IAMs played distinct mediating roles between science and policy, succeeding to adjust their scenario efforts to the continuously changing demands for knowledge from the policy community. In explaining the prominent role of IAMs, we differentiate between background conditions (material and sociological) and more contextual factors, most notably the flexible, hybrid and broad nature of IAMs as well as the pro-active character of the IAM community to enhance their policy relevance. We draw on the notion of institutional work to explain this success. In light of the urgency of responding to the climate crisis, we suggest that the IAM community may expand their scope of anticipated futures and consider engaging a wider range of publics and societal stakeholders beyond the science-policy interface.

The current ecological crisis will transform the face and fate of cities. Neighbourhoods for the Future is based on the conviction that we should rethink cities from the ambit of the neighbourhood. It revisits the neighbourhood as the designated scale and arena to build our urban futures. The neighbourhood is small enough to be tangible, yet big enough to make a difference. In order for neighbourhoods to really work, residents need to be engaged and the tactics should be embedded within a wider social policy, if we want thriving cities.

By introducing the concepts of neighbourhood arrangements and ecologies, based on examples in Europe and North America, this book provides a new perspective on the relation between participants, resources, and rules, to spark change and prepare urbanites and policymakers for realizing their own sustainable neighbourhoods for the future.

After the Paris agreement on climate change (2015) climate change politics is no longer about raising awareness but about shaping the sustainability transition itself. It requires us to rethink the role of scientific knowledge, shifting from a tradition of “expected futures” to an approach focusing on “desirable futures” and ways to get there. We argue the sustainability transitions scholarship tends to see constructions of the future (visions, scenarios, predictions etc.) as explanans (that what explains) while constructions of the future are rarely seen as explanandum (that what should be explained). The article introduces the concept of ‘Techniques of Futuring’ defined as practices bringing together actors around one or more imagined futures and through which actors come to share particular orientations for action, to get a grip on the actual acts of ‘futuring’. The empirical focus is on ‘2050—An Energetic Odyssey’ a process centred around an elaborate multimedia installation, introducing large scale exploitation of the North Sea for harvesting off shore wind energy taking place in 2015 and 2016. We examine the Odyssey as example of a Technique of Futuring. We conclude with a reflection what the Odyssey teaches us about effective Techniques of Futuring to further the sustainability transition.