In light of climate change, environmental politics is – maybe once again – facing a tremendous dilemma. On the one hand, climate scientists stress the need for ‘rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society’ (IPCC 2018, see also IPCC 2021) to reduce the heating of the planet and the latter’s negative social impacts. On the other hand, pleas for radical social change in light of ecological tipping points and imminent disaster have a long history of being readily dismissed as green authoritarianism. What, most typically, follows from this dismissal is the continuation of the status quo with (maybe) the exception of some incremental changes. In recent years, hands-on, participatory, knowledge co-producing, real-life experimentation in as opposed to expert-informed, political decisions on (more) climate-friendly living have commonly been presented as a promising way out of this dilemma. ‘The promise of experimentation’ (Evans et al. 2018) informs environmental governance, no less than knowledge production and civil society initiatives. It is widely believed that experimentation is the more sustainable route towards societal change and liveable futures than one shaped by decision. Without seeking to present experimentation and decision in an either-or-fashion, experimentation seems to have become the more prominent side in a relation between. Governance through (urban) living labs; producing knowledge in a more hands-on, participatory and situated way; civil society, niche experiments in living more sustainably that seek to bring about change by role-modelling and less by institutionalizing practices and scaling them have become the new normal’. This presentation challenges this ‘new normal’ – not to rehabilitate expert-driven end of the pipe-solutions and top-down political steering – spectres that readily haunt and delegitimize critical perspectives on ‘the promise of experimentation’. It does so to lay that, why, and how also experimentalism may be complicit in ‘sustaining the unsustainable’ (Blühdorn).