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

Transdisciplinary approaches have constituted a cornerstone of sustainability research in recent years. Tackling grand societal challenges, research in living labs promises innovations in real-world settings. In order to enable these innovations, living labs require the adoption of key design principles in everyday research, such as participation, co-creation and real-life experimentation, often resulting in challenges in terms of collaboration. Our study focuses on identifying and explaining the key challenges faced in everyday collaboration using data generated in a living lab research project targeting the transition to climate neutrality within the scope of a city corporation. Data was generated predominantly from twenty in-depth interviews and participant observations. The challenging reactions in transdisciplinary collaboration are manifest in uncertainties, frustrations, overburdening, tensions, conflicts and disengagement. Our analysis shows that these reactions are shaped by (1) heterogeneous interpretations of key living lab concepts, (2) heterogeneous perspectives on sustainability interventions, (3) difficulties in role positioning and allocation, (4) emergence of instrumentalisation and over-identification, and (5) embedded complexities of living lab governance. We argue that these proto-challenges are constitutive and implicitly inscribed into the key design principles of living lab research. By interpreting living lab research as an intrinsically wicked problem, we suggest three different strategies to cope with the challenges of collaboration: mitigate, embrace, tolerate.