Impacts beyond experimentation ‐ Conceptualising emergent impacts from long-term real-world laboratory processes

Real-world laboratories are settings for joint experimentation on sustainability challenges, through the transdisciplinary collaboration of diverse actor groups. By approaching a real-world laboratory from three perspectives, this paper uncovers the emergent impacts of a long-term collaborative process.Real-world laboratories have become a recognised research format for addressing sustainability challenges. In these transdisciplinary settings, actors from civil society, local government, and academia work together using a transdisciplinary research approach to jointly experiment and learn about sustainability transformations. While these labs are considered to have potential, their impact has not yet been fully measured. Therefore, in our paper we explore the case of the Zukunfts-stadt Lüneburg 2030+ process to uncover the impacts that this long-term effort has generated over the past eight years. By examining the process and its design features from three analytical perspectives, we identify emergent impacts in three dimensions: education, governance, and the lab as an actor for sustainability. Based on our case study, we suggest that real-world labs contribute to sustainability on a local level, beyond the intentional experiments, through impacts that emerge over the course of the joint operation of the lab.