The unseen in between: Unpacking, designing, and evaluating sustainability-oriented labs in real-world contexts

Abstract: We live in a time of compounding ecological and social change. Given its uncertain and urgent nature, contemporary forms of governance are experiencing tension between controlling the present and nurturing collective capacities to enact transformative change. Amidst a wave of interest in transitions and transformations in-the-making, labs in real-world contexts have entered the discussion. Labs have emerged as appealing, novel and highly complex entities that situate and localize engagement around complex sustainability challenges. Labs carry a systemic view of change; they comprise alternative and experimental approaches; they carry a normative assumption that research has plural roles; and they hold an explicit learning orientation that infuses knowledge with action. Given the unfolding of labs in the real world, my involvement in their design, and ongoing interests in treating both meanings and processes of sustainability, this thesis is organized around a curiosity. Its overarching aim is to investigate how sustainability-oriented labs could be unpacked, designed and evaluated in the context of sustainability transitions and transformations. Underlaboured by a critical realist philosophy of science, this thesis investigates sustainability-oriented labs by way of a qualitative-dominant, case-based research strategy. It does this across three overlapping research phases, culminating in four appended papers. In research phase one, we adopt a systematic review of sustainability-oriented labs in real-world contexts, exploring and classifying a global sample of labs according to their engagement with sustainability. In paper I, we identify and unpack 53 sustainability-oriented labs in real-world contexts. Through a mixed-methods analysis, we explore the distribution and diversity of these labs, discerning the research communities which conceptualize labs and the dimensions of their practice. In Paper III, we present an empirically grounded typology, arriving at six different types of sustainability-oriented labs: 1) Fix and control, 2) (Re-)Design and optimize, 3) Make and relate, 4) Educate and engage, 5) Empower and govern and 6) Explore and shape. In research phase two, paper II presents a qualitative case-based inquiry into Challenge Lab (C-Lab), a challenge-driven learning environment. Paper II conceptualizes challenge framing as embedded within an open-ended learning process, both on a level of practice and space. Experiences related to framing in C-Lab shed light on how students situate themselves and see their role within existing challenges, how they navigate limits to knowledge in complex systems, and how they self-assess their own sense of comfort and progress. In addition, we introduce three dilemmas that are not owned by teachers or students but emerge, as contradiction, within the learning space. In research phase three, paper IV presents a multi-case comparison of evaluation practices in various sustainability transition initiatives. We conceptualize and compare the role of evaluation as a tool that can enhance the transformative capacity of sustainability-oriented labs and its broader family of transition experiments. This thesis and its appended papers provide practical-experiential, empirical-conceptual and methodological contributions on the topic of sustainability-oriented labs in real-world contexts. In addition, it contains a layered account of an undisciplinary doctoral journey. I do this by (1) reflecting upon each research phase, (2) providing transparent accounts of positionality in relation to my research, (3) conceptualizing and reflecting upon undisciplinarity as a process of becoming, and (4) providing a mobile autoethnographic account of staying on the ground as part of a broader commitment to interrogate knowledge practices. Moving forward, I find myself motivated by three convictions: (1) transformations are needed, and labs are invitations in between dualisms, (2) invitations hold the possibility of flipping big assumptions and ethical practices, and (3) transformations presuppose fundamental change from within both research and education knowledge systems. They hinge upon the questioning of what both are, who they are for, and what they might need to become. In conclusion, they compel us to think big, start small, and act now.