1. For those who may not be familiar with the term, could you briefly explain what a Living Lab is and how it works in practice?
The idea of Living Labs draws on a history of social experiments, intentional communities, and cooperatives. In practice there are both Living Labs funded by the European Commission, and on-the-ground experiments which may not receive such funding, but work with funded Living Labs. A Living Lab within EU-funded research projects asks of us: for issues that impact people at multiple scales, how may we find an approach to experiment with societal transformation, balancing existing and possible alternative structures?
There’s this podcast episode by ALFAWetlands that I found inspiring, where a LUKE colleague who heads the Finnish Living Lab in the project says, the “living lab is on state-owned land, which means every Finnish citizen is a stakeholder”. This feature of co-creation is an internal belief of their open democracy, he adds.
Change often involves questioning and revising assumptions, which can be either easy or uncomfortable, depending on the person. A Living Lab creates a space to experiment with structure, allowing us to develop new working arrangements, agreements, and approaches. It can help us find common interests, or a shared stake in the topic—in FORbEST’s case, forest management—identify what change is desired, and to establish a long-term set of intentions and directions.
2. How are Living Labs being used within the FORbEST project, and why are they so important to the project’s overall goals?
In each country we work in – Finland, Romania, Hungary, Italy, Thailand, Czech Republic – we work with a partner organisation or team that identifies the first core group who will build a Living Lab with them. Each Living Lab takes on its own identity, with autonomy to determine its trajectory of growth.
Living Labs serve as a means for us to promote and develop core principles that steer a transformation in research and practice. We are guided by principles of participatory action research, a broad field focusing on iterative action and research, theory and praxis.
A key aspect of this work is building meaningful relationships. Instead of treating knowledge as something delivered from experts to users, we shape Living Labs in FORbEST as spaces for shared learning. By building ethical relationships over time, the possibility of increased desire and motivation to ‘participate’ grows.
FORbEST wants to find a better way to measure biodiversity, simulate future forest management plans, improve scientific research’s ability to communicate with foresters and forestry communities. It envisions a planet where forests and humans can grow together. This is a social ambition worth much more than the lifespan of this project. The Living Labs are the seeds of this ambition.
3. In your view, what are the key benefits of using Living Labs to involve stakeholders and communities in research and innovation initiatives like FORbEST?
Living Labs are important because they make research practical, localisable, and worth people’s time, not abstract or top-down.
Many people are used to decisions being made elsewhere, by experts or institutions, with little input from themselves. Over time, this leads to disengagement or skepticism. Living Labs try to interrupt that pattern. They create spaces where people who are not usually consulted can take part in shaping both knowledge and decisions.
In FORbEST, we are now at the stage where Living Labs are being established and local partners are identifying their first groups of participants. However we label these groups, what matters is creating the right conditions of support, clarity, and a direction that feels workable, for those leading the Labs. For any project aiming at lasting change, staying grounded in real-world questions is essential.
From my experience, how people act in a space depends on what they think that space is. In a site-specific intervention I worked on in Singapore in 2017, people first treated a shared urban garden as something to take from, or as a service to demand from. I wrote about this in a 2019 piece in the journal Urban Studies. But when we interrupted what had become habitual and acted differently ourselves, others began to take more care. Completely different behaviours emerged in the same place, within a few seconds.
This matters for forests. Forest management is about technique, experience, and expertise – and observation and curiosity too! It is also about the habits we, individually and as a collective, have formed over time. It is about our expectations, how we relate to one another, and to forests. For instance, if forests are seen as resources to extract from, without replenishing them, or needing control from afar, then building real-world practices for sustainable change is difficult.
Many assumptions that built the society we live in are set deep into everyday life and work. Living Labs change this by creating situations where people can engage, experiment, identify assumptions we no longer need, and reflect together. They allow different perspectives to meet on more equal terms. One anthropologist I continually learn from is Elizabeth Povinelli, whose work with the Karrabing Film Collective, and long-term fieldwork with a Belyuen community in the Northern Territories of Australia shows other ways of knowing “land” and “country”.
For projects like FORbEST, this leads to better outcomes. Any ‘solution’ or approach that passes through the Living Labs will be more grounded, more readily accepted, and more likely to last. Instead of imposing change, Living Labs build it with the people who will actually live out the consequences of that change.
For more listening/reading:
Ng, Huiying. “Recognising the Edible Urban Commons : Cultivating Latent Capacities for Transformative Governance in Singapore.” Urban Studies, no. January (2019). https://doi.org/10.1177/0042098019834248.
ALFAWetland. n.d. Episode 12: ALFAwetlands Living Labs and co-creation.
Available at: https://alfawetlands.eu/podcast/episode-11-alfawetlands-living-labs-and-co-creation/