Planting seeds or cultivating change? Digging into Living Labs’ contributions to transformative change

• Analysis of the potential and limitations of Living Labs in contributing to transformative change. • Featuring 10 Living Labs across diverse geographical settings, contexts, and key focus areas. • Living Labs foster shifts in views, support shifts in practices, but rarely shift structures. • Currently, Living Labs enable innovation but have limited ability to drive transformative change. • Institutional integration and long-term funding are key to set up Living Labs for transformative change. Research on transformative change has gained attention as a response to the interconnected and accelerating crises of today, often referred to as a ‘polycrisis’. Transformative change refers to fundamental, system-wide shifts in views, structures, and practices. Despite its urgent need, entrenched systems create significant barriers, making it challenging to translate into action and derive concrete steps. In this study, we investigate Living Labs to understand their potential role in enabling transformative change in real-world contexts. We aim to assess whether and to what extent Living Labs can facilitate shifts in views, structures, and practices, and to identify the barriers and enabling conditions that shape their impact. Using maximum variation sampling, we selected 10 Living Labs and conducted semi-structured interviews with narrative elements. Living Labs foster shifts in views by encouraging openness, critical reflection, and experiential learning, enabling actors to challenge existing mindsets and recognise their agency in driving change. They enable shifts in structures by fostering flexible local collaborations, though scaling remains challenging without formal recognition, as bureaucratic inertia and political barriers limit changes in formal governance. Living Labs foster shifts in practices through experimentation, hands-on learning, and inclusive collaboration, yet regulatory constraints and entrenched power structures often hinder lasting changes. We conclude that while Living Labs provide valuable experimental spaces enabling localised innovation and new forms of collaboration, their ability to drive transformative change remains limited. To exploit their full potential for transformative change, it is crucial to strengthen institutional integration and move beyond short-term and project-based funding.