Co-Creating Sustainability Interventions in Practice—Coping with Constitutive Challenges of Transdisciplinary Collaboration in Living Labs

Abstract

Sustainability research in Living Labs promises innovation through real-world experimentation. These settings require the integration of key design principles—such as participation, co-creation, and real-life application—into everyday research. Yet collaboration among diverse actors is often accompanied by persistent tensions and conflicts. This study examines a Living Lab project embedded in the net-zero transformation of a corporate city. It focuses on identifying and explaining key challenges in the daily collaboration between academic and non-academic actors, as well as the strategies used to cope with them. Following a qualitative approach, data were generated through twenty in-depth interviews and participant observations. We identify uncertainties, frustrations, overload, tensions, conflicts, and disengagement as recurring reactions in transdisciplinary collaboration. These are traced back to the following five underlying proto-challenges: (1) divergent interpretations of Living Lab concepts, (2) conflicting views on sustainability interventions, (3) difficulties in role positioning, (4) processes of instrumentalisation and over-identification, and (5) the embedded complexities of Living Lab governance. By linking these findings to Institutional Theory and Paradox Theory, we argue that the proto-challenges are not merely contingent barriers but constitutive tensions—implicitly inscribed into the normative design of Living Lab research and essential to engage with for advancing collaborative sustainability efforts.

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