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.

Cities with a car-oriented mobility system are significant consumers of energy and require drastic transformations in their structure and function to minimize their harmful impacts on environment and people and to achieve sustainability goals. To promote such sustainable transformations, municipal administrators need to act as change-agents. Because municipal governments are often not agile organizations, they tend toward incrementalism even in the pursuit of transformational goals. Therefore, there is a need in municipal governments to build individual transformative capacity so that municipal administrators can design, test, and implement plans, projects, and policies that are capable of transforming cities toward sustainability. This research presents a game-based workshop, “Stadt-liche Ziele” (AudaCity), that uses a backcasting approach to make municipal administrators build a sustainability strategy. I conducted a pilot study to test the effects of the game on municipal administrators’ confidence in their own ability and power to implement sustainability actions, a key determinant of transformative capacity. Five municipal administrators from Lüneburg, Germany, working on mobility issues, participated in a three-hour-workshop playing the game. Interviews and questionnaires were used before and after the workshop and participants’ contributions during the event were recorded to explore collective changes in confidence. Results indicate that the game increased participant confidence by rewarding collective success, breaking down an ambitious goal into achievable tasks, and acknowledging how administrators’ current actions already contribute to the goal.