Real-World Lab

Abstract

In the pursuit of accelerating and extending sustainability transformations, an experimental turn has occurred in sustainability research since the 2000s.Around the globe, more and more transdisciplinary laboratories and workshops like living labs, transition labs, etc. are established in real-world contexts, which foregrounds experimentation for more sustainability (McCrory et al. 2022;Turnheim et al. 2018).However, in Germany, a specific form of transdisciplinary experimental lab was developed during this time: real-world labs (German: Reallabor).These models are elaborate and impactful in terms of promoting change in everyday settings, with a focus on transdisciplinary and transformative sustainability research at the intersection of science and society at large.Against the background of increasingly pressing sustainability challenges and a necessary change in science (Schneidewind and Singer-Brodowski 2014; WBGU 2011), the concept of real-world labs found its way into academic research discourse and practice in the early 2010s (Parodi 2011; Schneidewind and Scheck 2013).Real-world labs are places and incubators to develop and research sustainability solutions, or, in a nutshell, to experiment and examine desirable societal futures by scientific means.Real-world labs can be set to explore a wide range of issues.This can be, for example, regenerative energy supply, socially responsible environmental protection, sustainable consumption, climate protection, or even the sustainable development of a city district.Many examples can be found on the real-world lab network website (2023).The crucial common aspects in how real-world labs are realized is that researchers and problem-owners enter into dialogue, share goals, and collaborate in practice.Researchers and (other) societal actors proceed transdisciplinarily and cooperatively, learn from each other, ref lexively minimize risks, and jointly initiate and shape contributions to sustainable development (Bergmann et al. 2021).In terms of content and concept, the recent term real-world lab still remains open to interpretation.Its definition is the subject of scientific and political debate (Schäpke et al. 2018) and does not meet with consensus.However, a widely

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 5 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.