Impacts beyond experimentation - Conceptualising emergent impacts from long-term real-world laboratory processes

Research output: Journal contributionsJournal articlesResearchpeer-review

Authors

Real-world laboratories have become a recognised research format for addressing sustainability challenges. In these transdisciplinary settings, actors from civil society, local government, and academia work together using a transdisciplinary research approach to jointly experiment and learn about sustainability transformations. While these labs are considered to have potential, their impact has not yet been fully measured. Therefore, in our paper we explore the case of the Zukunftsstadt Lüneburg 2030+ process to uncover the impacts that this long-term effort has generated over the past eight years. By examining the process and its design features from three analytical perspectives, we identify emergent impacts in three dimensions: education, governance, and the lab as an actor for sustainability. Based on our case study, we suggest that real-world labs contribute to sustainability on a local level, beyond the intentional experiments, through impacts that emerge over the course of the joint operation of the lab.

Original languageEnglish
JournalGAIA - Ecological Perspectives for Science and Society
Volume33
Issue numberSupplement 1
Pages (from-to)18-25
Number of pages8
ISSN0940-5550
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 16.03.2024

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
Acknowledgement: We thank all the people who have been involved for many years in jointly shaping and carrying out collaborative real-world lab work in and around Lüneburg. We especially thank our colleague Antje Seidel for her contribution to the development of this article and collaborative work in recent years within the Zukunftsstadt Lüneburg 2030+ project. Furthermore, we would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their time and effort in reviewing the manuscript. We sincerely appreciate their comments, which have helped us to improve this article. Funding: German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), funder id: 10.13039/501100002347 (grant no: 13ZS0058B). Competing interests: The authors declare no competing interests. Author contribution: PB, AW, TK: research design, original draft of the manuscript; PB, AW, TK, DL: final manuscript.

Publisher Copyright:
© 2024 by the authors.

    Research areas

  • emergent impact, process design, real-world laboratory, transdisciplinary sustainability research, transformative research Leuphana
  • Transdisciplinary studies

DOI

Recently viewed

Researchers

  1. Zhiyong Xie
  2. Paul Drews

Publications

  1. Social identity and place-based dynamics in community resilience building for natural disasters
  2. Analysing the gender wage gap (GWG) using personnel records
  3. Anisotropic wavelet bases and thresholding
  4. On the impact of network size and average degree on the robustness of centrality measures
  5. Understanding and managing post-acquisition integration as change process
  6. How problem-based or direct instructional case-based learning environments influence pre-service teachers’ cognitive load, motivation and emotions
  7. From estimation results to stylized facts
  8. The common European framework of reference for languages
  9. Effects of tree diversity on canopy space occupation vary with tree size and canopy space definition in a mature broad-leaved forest
  10. Reiseanalyse 2013:
  11. Operationalising the leverage points perspective for empirical research
  12. Papers from the 10th Lancaster University Postgraduate Conference in Linguistics and Language Teaching 2015
  13. Generating dispatching rules for semiconductor manufacturing to minimize weighted tardiness
  14. Two Mediterranean annuals feature high within-population trait variability and respond differently to a precipitation gradient
  15. Organizational Practices for the Aging Workforce
  16. Embedded, not plugged-in
  17. A conceptual cross-disciplinary model of organizational practices for older workers
  18. The Challenge of Democratic Representation in the European Union
  19. An Advanced Double Column-Switching Technique (LC-LC) for Liquid Chromatography/Electrospray Ionisation Tandem Mass Spectrometry for Fully Automated Analysis of Caspofungin
  20. Introduction: Modeling the Pacific Ocean
  21. Residual stresses in continuously reinforced composite profiles with symmetric cross sections
  22. Equivalence unbalanced-metaphor, case, and example-from Aristotle to Derrida
  23. where paintings live
  24. Creative Network Communities in the Translocal Space of Digital Networks
  25. Do You Like What You (Can't) See? The Differential Effects of Hardware and Software Upgrades on High-Tech Product Evaluations
  26. New prototype of the two-legged robot centaurob
  27. EEG frequency tagging evidence of intact social interaction recognition in adults with autism