Urban experiments are no longer exclusively undertaken by alternative networks, dominated by new actors and alliances and located at the fringes of the current system. A second generation of initiatives is emerging, which Is characterized by a leading role for local governments, together with other established players. For experimentation at the fringes of the regime the challenge is to maximally benefit from niche protection while seizing opportunities to influence regime dynamics. Second generation experiments face a different challenge: to benefit from the proximity to the regime while maintaining a protective space for developing ‘deviant’ solutions. I will draw on insights on reflexive governance to develop a framework for understanding this challenge and strategies to meet it. I will use an ongoing project on achieving synergy between energy, water and data infrastructures in Amsterdam as an empirical referent to clarify and sharpen the argument. The framework includes propositions on strategies for this newly emerging types of initiatives, focusing on the processes through which they do or do not work. They may be tested and further developed through case studies. Such work may also contribute to meta-theoretical issue of the relations between institutional, discursive and material factors in driving change.

Transitions to deal with the grand challenges of contemporary societies require novel kinds of leadership, which can both stimulate novel organizational practices and changes in practices and structures in the organization’s context. This article seeks to understand how (changes in) the external structural context may influence organizational-internal transformative leadership and vice versa, and what kind of work is implied in leadership to transform current business models. It uses notions from literature on relational leadership and transformative leadership as sensitizing concepts. It then explores the leadership work in two case studies, on fishing in Portugal and care farming in the Netherlands. We find a dialectic interplay of the interactions between leaders and others on the one hand, and contextual changes on the other. Using a system-building perspective from innovation system literature, that interaction is driven by the quest to establish legitimacy and market formation and acceptance, knowledge and other resources for innovations.