Social Innovation Laboratories, or short, social labs, represent an emerging field of lab-based inquiry to sustainability transitions, which emphasize learning through experimentation to find new ways of addressing highly complex challenges. Yet, a key challenge for these initiatives is on one hand to know whether they are “on track”, on the other hand, to evaluate their contribution to addressing a complex challenge. Our hypothesis was that adaptive capacity could serve as a lens for the evaluation of a social labs impact to building social resilience and hence in building capacities necessary for a transition towards sustainability. The aim of this research was firstly to gain a better understanding of the evaluation practices of social labs and secondly to find out how the adaptive capacity of a social lab could be evaluated and might, more generally, point towards a novel approach of evaluating in complexity for strategic sustainable development. Our results suggest that adaptive capacity could support evaluations by providing a mirror for the essential features of a social lab to be resilient. We propose three key aspects to evaluate: systems thinking, trust and prototyping capacity. Yet, this is only a first stepping stone toward an evaluation framework, which will require field testing and further research.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:bth-16628 |
| Date | January 2018 |
| Creators | Nguyen, Trang, Dirks, Robin, Woolner, Robin |
| Publisher | Blekinge Tekniska Högskola, Institutionen för strategisk hållbar utveckling, Blekinge Tekniska Högskola, Institutionen för strategisk hållbar utveckling, Blekinge Tekniska Högskola, Institutionen för strategisk hållbar utveckling |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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