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Urban living labs have emerged as spatially embedded arenas for governing urban transformation, where heterogenous actor configurations experiment with new practices, institutions, and infrastructures. This article observes a nascent shift towards experimentation at the precinct scale and responds to a need to further investigate relevant processes in urban experimentation at this scale, and identifies particular challenges for urban planning. We tentatively conceptualise precincts as spatially bounded urban environments loosely delineated by a particular combination of social or economic activity. Our methodology involves an interpretive systematic literature review of urban experimentation and urban living labs at precinct scale, along with an empirical illustration of the Net Zero Initiative at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, which is operationalising its main campus into a living lab focussed on precinct-scale decarbonisation. We identify four processual categories relevant to precinct-scale experimentation: embedding, framing, governing, and learning. We use the empirical illustration to discuss the relevance of these processes, refine findings from the literature review and conclude with a discussion on the implications of our article for future scholarship on urban planning by experiment at precinct scale.

This article explores the COVID-19 pandemic as an external \"shock\" that changed household-consumption practices in Melbourne, Australia. We assess national consumption data and retail data for the state of Victoria to show how dramatically consumption patterns shifted during 2020. We then discuss three specific examples of changed consumption practices during the pandemic drawn from an analysis of media reports: bread baking, food growing, and bicycle riding. These activities illustrate how the pandemic and resultant lockdowns enabled innovation in domestic consumption, enhanced food security and resilience, and created space for the experience of a slower way of life. We argue that the pandemic provided impetus to experiment and innovate in ways that are relevant to sustainability but not necessarily motivated by it. Further, there is limited evidence that sustainable consumption practices will live on at an integrated mass scale, given a lack of wider institutional effects, such as changes in policy, business strategy, or mass social movements to support them. Instead, we hypothesize that these new consumption experiences \"discovered\" during the lockdown will live on as practice memories that might be mobilized when the next shock comes.

Rapidly developing countries like India face numerous challenges related to social and environmental sustainability, which are associated with their fast economic growth and rising energy demand, climate change, and widening disparities between the rich and the poor. Recently, a number of claims have been made in the literature that the prospects of alternative development pathways in emerging economies in Asia are becoming more likely, and that these economies might even leapfrog Western initiatives. This paper contributes by reporting on the five most visible and established initiatives in the area of off-grid PV solar energy in India, specifically homing in on the innovative business models that are evolving. We develop a new typology of upscaling dimensions in order to analyze these five initiatives. They are found to be quite successful, but have difficulty in terms of reaching the poorest of the poor (deep upscaling) and bringing about required institutional change (institutional upscaling).

Bridge research, policy and practice This refers to the active work required to create enduring connections between researchers, policy makers, and industry partners to build pathways for the adoption of interdisciplinary research outputs and ensure real‐world impact. The Centre was established in 2011 and grew into a diverse program of integrated research projects, attracting additional funding along the way and increasingly targeting and training a global community of interdisciplinary agri‐health professionals and researchers. [...]Emily Nix and colleagues explore the use of participatory action research as a framework for facilitating collaboration with transdisciplinary researchers and with participant communities. Waage and colleagues, for instance, report how to build upon a range of mechanisms, including co‐supervision of researchers by a minimum of two disciplines, focused interdisciplinary trainings to reach disciplinary specialists, learning labs to build interdisciplinary skills, and the deliberate attempts to co‐create shared conceptual frameworks to “exploit the integrative power of conceptual frameworks.”

Non-Technical SummaryEnabling local adoption of the sustainable development goals (SDGs) is important to accelerate global efforts to achieve sustainable development. However, local governments have plural perspectives on how to engage with the SDGs. In this paper, we identify three perspectives on how to enable local SDGs based on cases of nine local governments in Australia. We emphasize the need for seeing local SDG adoption as contextualized and actor-driven processes.Technical SummaryLocal governments worldwide are taking the initiative to engage with sustainable development goals (SDGs) despite the absence of a globally coordinated guideline on local SDGs actions. With less than a decade until its 2030 deadline, a more targeted and nuanced approach to enabling local SDG actions is needed. In this paper, we argue that there is a need to look at local SDG actions as an actor-driven process where agency, contexts, purpose, and dynamics co-evolve and shape the outcome of the process. Using Q-methodology, we explore different perspectives on what enables local SDGs actions in nine local governments in Australia. Three perspectives in enabling local SDG actions emerged from the study: (1) ‘Enablers should support institutional embeddedness of the SDGs’, (2) ‘Enablers should support stakeholder coordination for the SDGs’, and (3) ‘Enablers should support community engagement for the SDGs’. Each perspective has preferred enablers, contextualized within certain ways of engaging with the SDGs, certain views of the SDGs, and specific local contexts and capacities. This study provides insights to contextualize knowledge in current literature to enable local SDG actions.Social media summaryMany understand that the local adoption of the sustainable development goals (SDGs) is not a one-shoe-fits-all process, but what are some of the plurality in local SDG adoptions? In this paper, we identify three perspectives on enabling the SDGs based on nine local governments in Australia.

Data governance is an emerging field of study concerned with how a range of actors can successfully manage data assets according to rules of engagement, decision rights, and accountabilities. Urban studies scholarship has continued to demonstrate and criticize lack of community engagement in smart city development and urban data governance projects, including in local sustainability initiatives. However, few move beyond critique to unpack in more detail what community engagement should look like. To overcome this gap, we develop and test a participatory methodology to identify approaches to empowering community engagement in data governance in the context of the Monash Net Zero Precinct in Melbourne, Australia. Our approach uses design for social innovation to enable a small group of “precinct citizens” to co-design prototypes and multicriteria mapping as a participatory appraisal method to open up and reveal a diversity of perspectives and uncertainties on data governance approaches. The findings reveal the importance of creating deliberative spaces for pluralising community engagement in data governance that consider the diverse values and interests of precinct citizens. This research points toward new ways to conceptualize and design enabling processes of community engagement in data governance and reflects on implementation strategies attuned to the politics of participation to support the embedding of these innovations within specific socio-institutional contexts.

Non-Technical SummaryThis article takes stock of the 2030 Agenda and focuses on five governance areas. In a nutshell, we see a quite patchy and often primarily symbolic uptake of the global goals. Although some studies highlight individual success stories of actors and institutions to implement the goals, it remains unclear how such cases can be upscaled and develop a broader political impact to accelerate the global endeavor to achieve sustainable development. We hence raise concerns about the overall effectiveness of governance by goal-setting and raise the question of how we can make this mode of governance more effective.Technical SummaryA recent meta-analysis on the political impact of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) has shown that these global goals are moving political processes forward only incrementally, with much variation across countries, sectors, and governance levels. Consequently, the realization of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development remains uncertain. Against this backdrop, this article explores where and how incremental political changes are taking place due to the SDGs, and under what conditions these developments can bolster sustainability transformations up to 2030 and beyond. Our scoping review builds upon an online expert survey directed at the scholarly community of the ‘Earth System Governance Project’ and structured dialogues within the ‘Taskforce on the SDGs’ under this project. We identified five governance areas where some effects of the SDGs have been observable: (1) global governance, (2) national policy integration, (3) subnational initiatives, (4) private governance, and (5) education and learning for sustainable development. This article delves deeper into these governance areas and draws lessons to guide empirical research on the promises and pitfalls of accelerating SDG implementation.Social Media SummaryAs SDG implementation lags behind, this article explores 5 governance areas asking how to strengthen the global goals.

It is generally accepted that the concept of sustainability is not straightforward, but is subject to ongoing ambiguities, uncertainties and contestations. Yet literature on sustainability transitions has so far only engaged in limited ways with the resulting tough questions around what sustainability means, to whom and in which contexts. This paper makes a contribution to this debate by unpacking sustainability in India and Thailand in the context of solar photovoltaic and urban mobility experimentation. Building on a database of sustainability experiments and multicriteria mapping techniques applied in two workshops, the paper concludes that sustainability transition scholarship and associated governance strategies must engage with such questions in at least three important ways. First, there is a need for extreme caution in assuming any objective status for the sustainability of innovations, and for greater reflection on the normative implications of case study choices. Second, sustainability transition scholarship and governance must engage more with the unpacking of uncertainties and diverse possible socio-technical configurations even within (apparently) singular technological fields. Third, sustainability transition scholarship must be more explicit and reflective about the specific geographical contexts within which the sustainability of experimentation is addressed.

Waste management is critical for addressing interconnected social and environmental crises associated with urbanisation, pollution, and climate change. Circular Economy (CE) is a popular approach in policy-making and the private sector to re-envision waste management beyond current take-make-dispose models. Despite the potential to promote radical reconfiguration of unsustainable regimes of resource extraction and consumerism, CE is critiqued as a techno-centric, top-down model with ambiguous environmental and social outcomes, particularly for marginalised communities in the Global South. This paper develops a transformative approach to CE transitions integrating systems change and social justice dimensions, informed by CE, sustainability transitions, and participatory design literatures. Based on a review of 33 empirical cases centring Global South perspectives, we propose and illustrate 10 transformative principles. We conclude that these principles offer a promising, sustainable, and just approach to operationalise CE in Global South contexts whose relevance should be tested through deliberate design of CE initiatives.