Description
Labs of various guises – including ‘policy labs’, ‘innovation labs’, ‘future labs’ and ‘living labs’ – have proliferated in recent years as semi-institutionalised spaces for crafting solutions to contemporary problems across levels of governance. But while scholarship has paid increasing attention to such labs at national and local levels, their existence in global politics has been widely neglected. We address this oversight by conceptualising and mapping global governance labs, which we define as labs hosted within or sponsored by an international institution (even if the lab is located somewhere else). Assuming that the design and work of labs is inherently political because they produce and disseminate usable knowledge at the science–policy interface, we investigate key features of global governance labs: what types of labs exist; what they seek to achieve; in what institutional settings they are embedded; and how, and in whose interest, they operate. In short, we offer a first conceptual cut and empirical overview of the phenomenon of global governance labs. We thus contribute to research in International Relations and cognate fields on the role of expertise, experimental governance, evidence-based policymaking and scientification in global politics.
