ENERGISE paper in GAIA Special Issue on Real-World Labs – Open Access !!!

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How can we accelerate transformations towards more sustainable societies and transfer existing knowledge into action? Establishing society-based labs, where societal and scientific actors jointly experiment in real-world contexts, are one popular answer. The new GAIA special issue focuses on reflections and empirical insights regarding labs in the real world and builds bridges among the growing research community.

The paper by ENERGISE researchers can be downloaded from here  or read online:
Designing Real-World Laboratories for the Reduction of Residential Energy Use. Articulating Theories of Change > (open access)
Eva Heiskanen, Senja Laakso, Kaisa Matschoss, Julia Backhaus, Gary Goggins, Edina Vadovics

Reducing residential energy use and carbon dioxide emissions is a policy concern across Europe. One of the approaches to address this problem, real-world laboratories (RwLs), has recently gained prominence as a means to generate both sustainability change and social knowledge. Yet RwLs are context-bound, and transferability is an issue for scaling up change. Drawing on Realistic Evaluation (RE) and Theories of Change (ToC), this paper analyses researchers' and practitioners' views on the role of contexts and change mechanisms in the outcomes of interventions targeting residential energy use. The results show that extracting the underlying logic of RwL designs could help to identify where and when these designs are likely to be transferrable. This contribution has implications for the design of future RwLs, given that RwLs have until now rarely articulated their ToC.


Read all articles Open Access:
www.ingentaconnect.com/content/oekom/gaia

Publisher's website: www.gaia-online.net