In I-CHANGE we are working on setting up Living Labs in 8 cities. These 8 Living Labs will, through citizen science activities and a broader citizen and stakeholder engagement, research on and collect data concerning the local climate change challenges. The higher purpose of I-CHANGE is to see if creating local awareness and engagement will lead to changes of habits in the local population.
This places great demands on the citizen engagement of the I-CHANGE Living Labs. And of course, an important step in I-CHANGE is preparing and training the 8 Living Lab research teams to have a strong focus on the barriers and enablers on citizen engagement, but also on the ethics and how to ensure equitable and just green transitions.
In managing the set-up of the 8 Living Labs Danish Board of Technology use different methods. This week they facilitated a workshop by Päivi Abernethy from the Natural Resources Institute Finland (LUKE), one of the I-CHANGE consortium partners. Päivi Abernethy presented and elaborated the main findings from a state of the art literature review in the project deliverable “Working with Just transition and Citizen engagement in Living Labs – Guidelines to promote the engagement and awareness raising of citizens”. This was very useful, and all parties gained solid lessons. Being in the middle of planning the implementation of activities and the communication strategy in their Living Labs, the Living Lab partners can benefit a lot from the findings on community engagement and social change in social scientific literature.
By Stine Skot, DBT