Renewable energy Living Labs through the lenses of responsible innovation: building an inclusive, reflexive, and sustainable energy transition

ABSTRACT

Responsible Innovation (RI) offers Sustainability Transitions (ST) research methodologies a pathway to enable more inclusive, responsive, and sustainable transitions. Specifically, Living Labs (LLs) can benefit from RI scholarship in the scope of their sustainability research designs, as they may thereby be able to better foster critical thinking, inclusivity, and reflexivity. Drawing on a review of LLs literature and the self-reported assessments of researchers, experts and stakeholders involved in 12 LLs experiences, this research article sets out to explore how RI dimensions might serve to advance the practice of LLs in the context of ST research. The 12 LLs from seven European countries were centred on renewable energy prosumer initiatives. This analysis looks into how stakeholders were identified and involved, what inclusivity issues were addressed and what challenges were identified, to draw key lessons learned for advancing with RI in the scope of transdisciplinary energy transition studies.

KEYWORDS:

• Living Labs
• RI dimensions
• evaluation
• lessons learned
• energy transition

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by European Commission: [Grant Number 764056]; Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia: [Grant Number 2020.01663.CEECIND/CP1605/CT0005]; Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia: [Grant Number UIDB/00329/2020]; European Comission, European Union: [Grant Number 764056].

Notes on contributors

Inês Campos

Inês Campos received a doctorate in Climate Change Adaptation and Sustainable Development Policies/Sociology from the University of Lisbon. Her post-doctoral research integrates interdisciplinary social sciences, sustainability and energy research, and data analytics, focusing on the societal aspects of climate change adaptation, including social innovation, and the active role of citizens in the energy transition. She coordinated the H2020 project PROSEU (Mainstreaming prosumers in the energy union). She is presently coordinating the Horizon Europe project INCITE-DEM (Inclusive Citizenship in a World in Transformation: Co-Designing for Democracy). Her main research focus is on delivering new knowledge for a more just and inclusive socio-ecological transformation. She enjoys navigating between quantitative methods and data analytics and participatory approaches to building a broader societal engagement in climate change mitigation and energy transformations. Esther Marín-González is a researcher at the Centre for Ecology, Evolution and Environmental Changes (cE3c) located at the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Lisbon (Ciências ULisboa, Portugal). She received her doctorate in Biology and Plant Biotechnology from the Autonomous University of Barcelona. She also holds a MA in European Studies on Society, Science and Technology (with a specialization in Governance, Innovation, and Sustainability), and a MSc in Scientific, Medical and Environmental Communication. Her current research interests are in the interplay between science, technology and society, science and environmental communication, and knowledge co-production in participatory research practices.