How can existing experiences of regulatory experimentation inform AI sandbox design in Europe? This paper explores the ‘responsible AI’ sandbox of the Norwegian Data Protection Agency (DPA), a GDPR-oriented regulatory experiment created in 2020 with four projects per annum. Through an interpretive policy analysis of documents (exit reports and workshop transcripts) and semi-structured interviews with officials, we explore how the Norwegian DPA approached its mandate of ‘helping with responsible innovation’, where it identified role conflicts, and what scope conditions and challenges it perceived around sandbox work. Sandboxing represented a ‘new way of working’ for the regulatory authority: in an idea-based intervention mode, the DPA moves from rule-based interventions as a watchdog to becoming a dialogue-oriented partner in solution-finding, a concretiser of ambiguous GDPR rules, and a keen learner from sectoral and technical experts. Critical engagement with our data suggests that sandbox design should not be reduced to technical and procedural questions. It requires regulators’ critical reflexivity on their ambivalent role and power relations in the regulatory experiment: how to strategically select relevant projects and issues, how to navigate budgetary constraints and the lack of follow-ups, and how sandboxing affects more interventionist regulatory duties.

A growing appreciation of the potential benefits of experimentation to tame the complexities of urban transformation has led to an increase in related research activity. Building on a “practice-to-policy” experimentation-based framework, this paper investigates the adaptive policymaking process for urban regeneration in Shenzhen since the 2000s. It finds that “explorative experimentation” is used to identify a general direction in the absence of a clear route for the policy process, while “generative experimentation” is sequentially dedicated to specific issues for the improvement of the entire policy package within a particular reform. We argue that understanding the successive roles or hybrid functions of these two types of experiment adds new insights to the development rationales for Shenzhen's urban regeneration and provides inspiration for an experimental model of urban governance. Governments and policymakers can benefit from the experimentation-based approach, as presented in the Shenzhen case, to pursue policy innovation embedded in local contexts.

Why do policy experimentation regimes breakdown? And, if there are recognizable patterns of experimental failure, what might explain the variation? Focusing on aviation, finance and food safety, this article considers why a policy style that has been credited with China's successes in the past is failing to address governance challenges in these sectors at present. The article moves beyond discussions of policy mis-implementation by reframing experimental failure as a case of policy maladaptation under conditions of complexity and ambiguity. Maladaptation describes how approaches used in previous periods to foster adaptation can inadvertently make a system less resilient in the future. The analysis shows how the degree of consolidation of previously successful experimental regimes lends itself to certain types of maladaptation in the present: consolidated regimes are unable to generate policy alternatives (aviation), moderately consolidated regimes are maladapted for selection (finance), and unconsolidated regimes impede niche creation (food safety).

The regulation of short-lived climate pollutants (SLCPs) is widely seen as an important dimension of global atmospheric pollution control and climate change governance. SLCPs emitted outside the Arctic influence the Arctic atmosphere, Arctic communities, and the rate of ice melt. As an intergovernmental forum that brings together three of the world’s major petroleum producers (Russia, the United States, and Canada), the Arctic Council has a pivotal role in reducing the rate of Arctic warming through SLCP mitigation. This article explores the Arctic Council’s approach to SLCP mitigation. It begins by addressing the current status of black carbon and methane in international legal instruments, and goes on to explore the important regime linkages that are set in place through the Arctic Council’s Framework for Action on Enhanced Black Carbon and Methane Emission Reductions. The article suggests that the Arctic Council provides an experimental platform that may catalyze SLCP regulation not only in Arctic jurisdictions but also in Arctic Council observer states, such as China and India. The transnational and inclusive character of the Arctic Council’s constitutional framework and knowledge-generating mechanisms enables new pathways for global action on climate change and air pollution governance.