The local community as a “low-carbon lab”: Promises and perils

Strategic niche management (SNM) conceives of local experiments within protected spaces as important initiators of learning and empowerment of new sustainable technologies. We complement political perspectives on local experiments with evidence on the personal experiences of local and national-level decision makers involved in a Finnish programme called Carbon-Neutral Municipalities, which engaged five small municipalities as “low carbon labs”. The SNM literature can benefit from an understanding of how ordinary people experience experiments and interpret their results. We suggest that low-carbon experiments can offer promise to ordinary citizens and politicians by supporting the deployment of new technologies, contributing to local learning, offering outside input, and offering “proof of principle” that greenhouse gas emissions can be reduced. However, ordinary people judge experimentation on different criteria than scientists. In order to serve as “proof of principle” and encourage people to persist in climate action, local low-carbon experiments cannot afford to fail.