Christian Scholl

In the search for solutions to complex challenges posed by climate change and sustainability transitions, organizations often turn to innovative approaches and new cognitive frames. Particularly in the public sector, however, entrenched institutional logics often impede progress toward novel solutions. This paper explores how a public organization in the Dutch water sector navigates competing and sometimes conflicting frames and institutional logics through design-thinking. The object of study is a 6-month project initiated by a regional water authority in response to a severe flooding in 2021. The project aimed to develop and reimagine instruments for inclusive and climate-adaptive water management in collaboration with diverse actors. Based on participant observation and qualitative interviews, we analyze a series of design-thinking workshops where diverse stakeholders co-created tools for climate-adaptive water management. The findings disclose the existence of significant conflicts between the frames and institutional logics and offer details on how these were addressed through repeated stakeholder interaction and institutional work. We found that individuals showed varied responses to the emerging institutional logics, and that dominant institutional logics were diversely interpreted by different actors within the organization. Our research shows how iterative, participatory design methods can help actors temporarily shift institutional logics, but also reveals persistent challenges in achieving enduring changes to dominant institutions.

The Dutch national government has decided to push the implementation of the “energy transition” it aspires to by inviting clusters of municipalities (so-called RES regions) to develop a regional energy strategy (RES). However, since the new renewable energy land-use claims compete with a growing number of land-use demands, RES implementation confronts land-use conflicts, resulting in complex trade-offs for conflict resolution and planning around polarization. In the Dutch context of land scarcity and a rich planning tradition that arose specifically to deal with this and ensuing conflicts, the need for integrated landscape management seems obvious. This article offers a comparative case study of two RES-related land-use conflicts and their management in South Limburg, focusing on the question of how far these cases display elements of an integrated landscape approach (ILA). The ILA is applied as an analytical framework to evaluate the land-use conflict management processes of the case studies by assessing which elements of ILA are present and whether their relative presence and quality help to resolve the conflicts. Based on document and media content analysis and 15 interviews, this article analyzes the different land-use claims, objectives, and landscape values identified in two RES areas and how they overlap or compete, resulting in conflicts or synergies. Our findings show that the ILA provides useful guidelines for tackling RES-related land-use conflicts, but does not pay sufficient attention to the political dimension.

Editorial: Social movements and sustainable urban commons governance

The contribution of the first generation of urban living labs (ULLs) to system-wide sustainability transformations is thus far less than expected. A possible explanation for this can be found in the focus of most ULLs on local, highly contextualized knowledge, and a missing link to system-wide transformations through diffusion and upscaling beyond the geographic boundaries of the lab. Meta-learning, i.e., learning across multiple, distributed experiments, through networked ULLs seems to offer a way forward. However, the literature on city networks shows that meta-learning cannot be effectively facilitated in horizontal networks without a learning infrastructure. To address this shortcoming and inspire a second generation of ULLs, this Perspective paper outlines a meta-lab approach actively facilitating the contribution of local living labs to wider sustainability transformations. We see a meta-lab as a transurban multi-actor network to connect and, where possible, align the learning processes across thematically related ULLs in different urban contexts through a central learning agenda. The meta-lab approach respects and supports local learning agendas and their focus on local solutions for local problems, while acknowledging and utilizing the potential of local experiments to contribute to a central learning agenda. Our paper argues that a meta-lab approach can act as a catalyst of learning in two important ways: (1) by accelerating local experimentation and learning processes by feeding them with lessons from other locations; and (2) by facilitating a more focused – local and transurban – learning process through a shared learning agenda. The meta-lab approach thus stimulates urban sustainability transformations by supporting faster, more focused and wider learning about effective innovations. We conclude this paper by outlining how common pitfalls in transurban learning can be avoided by a careful design of the meta-lab, or by meeting certain conditions when implementing this design.

‘Urban planning by experiment’ can be seen as an approach that uses experimentation to innovate and improve urban planning instruments, approaches, and outcomes. Nowadays, urban experiments—interventions in the city with the aim to innovate, learn, or gain experience—are increasingly taking place in the context of Urban Living Labs. In the Netherlands, a certain type of Urban Living Lab, called city labs, is flourishing, and it has been suggested that these labs could make an important contribution to ‘urban planning by experiment.’ However, previous studies have indicated that this will depend on how experimentation is conducted in these labs. To obtain a more comprehensive picture of the practice of experimentation, we conducted a survey among Dutch city labs, supplemented by individual and group interviews with practitioners from a small subset of the 17 responding labs. We conclude that there is a poor match between the practice of experimentation in Dutch city labs and the characteristics that are considered to support effective ‘urban planning by experiment’ (i.e., a structured approach to experimentation, co-creation of experiments, active and targeted dissemination of lessons learned, and experiments as linking pins between municipal policy goals and the needs of urban society). This suggests that the current contribution of Dutch city labs to ‘urban planning by experiment’ is probably quite limited. Further research is needed to determine whether the typical practice of experimentation encountered in the Dutch city labs, i.e., action-oriented, resource-limited, and largely driven by opportunities, is also found in Urban Living Labs elsewhere.

In this article, we examine a change initiative designed to involve households in testing ways to transform two everyday practices ‒ heating and doing laundry. The research design included an examination of the challenges of changing practices either in a setting that fosters collective engagement or with individual households. Two different types of living labs were carried out simultaneously in eight European countries in Autumn–Winter 2018. We reflect on differences in results in terms of both changes in practices and the experiences of participating households that we argue can be at least partially attributed to householders’ engagement in different types of living labs. We discuss the implications of an individual-focused vs. community-oriented approach for change initiatives seeking to challenge social norms for sustainability transitions, concentrating in particular on differences in the nature of participants’ engagement and their willingness and ability to challenge routine practices. This is complemented by analytical reflections on the differences in design, interaction, and performance between the two types of living labs. We show that an explicit focus on collaborative engagement in living labs can produce results that reflect shared experiences, community support, challenging established norms, and collective commitment toward change.