Transitions towards sustainability are urgently needed to address the interconnected challenges of economic development, ecological integrity, and social justice, from local to global scales. Around the world, collaborative science-society initiatives are forming to conduct experiments in support of sustainability transitions. Such experiments, if carefully designed, provide significant learning opportunities for making progress on transition efforts. Yet, there is no broadly applicable evaluative scheme available to capture this critical information across a large number of cases, and to guide the design of transition experiments. To address this gap, the article develops such a scheme, in a tentative form, drawing on evaluative research and sustainability transitions scholarship, alongside insights from empirical cases. We critically discuss the scheme's key features of being generic, comprehensive, operational, and formative. Furthermore, we invite scholars and practitioners to apply, reflect and further develop the proposed tentative scheme -making evaluation and experiments objects of learning.

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While climate change action plans are becoming more common, it is still unclear whether communities have the capacity, tools, and targets in place to trigger the transformative levels of change required to build fundamentally low-carbon, resilient, healthy communities. Evidence increasingly supports the finding that this transformation is not triggered by climate policy alone, but rather is shaped by a broad array of decisions and practices that are rooted in underlying patterns of development. Even so, these findings have rarely penetrated the domain of practice, which often remains squarely focused on a relatively narrow set of climatespecific policies. This article builds a conceptual framework for understanding the dynamics of community-level development path transformations that may both dramatically reduce GHG emissions and significantly enhance community resilience. This framework illuminates eight critical enablers of innovation on climate change, each of which is illustrated by compelling examples of community-level experimentation on climate change across the province of British Columbia, Canada. It is concluded that community-based climate (or sustainability) policy might be more likely to trigger development path shifts if it employs a longer time horizon, recognition of adaptability and feedbacks, integrated decision making, and systems thinking. Policy relevance:This article deepens the understanding of the underlying drivers of both GHG emissions and vulnerability to climate change impacts. A development path framing of climate change responses suggests that highly nonlinear opportunities may emerge to push drivers of emissions or vulnerability over a tipping point and trigger a shift that cascades beyond the community in which the initial action took place. The findings highlight the need for policy approaches that use longer time horizons, systems thinking, adaptive management, and integrated decision making in community planning.

Abstract. The papers in this theme issue seek to advance our understanding of the roles of networks and partnerships in the multilevel governance of climate change and related issues in the urban context. In particular, the papers examine the roles of nontraditional actors and apply emerging theoretical approaches such as sustainability transitions theory to gain a greater understanding of the variety of approaches being employed around the world, as well as the transformative potential of these approaches. We discuss the role of the state relative to the roles of local leadership, knowledge systems, and community-wide collaborative engagement in bringing about sustainability transitions.

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