Abstract
Real-world laboratories (RWL) involve co-design and co-creation of knowledge based on a transdisciplinary cooperation of actors from different social worlds – academia, administration, economy, civil society – each endowed with specific interests, resources and worldviews. According to their claim, RWLs are supposed to be a means of inclusive participation in the co-creative shaping of solutions for socioecological issues. In the literature dealing with RWLs, participation is thus mainly understood as an active involvement by civil society, change agents and citizens in processes of experimentation and implementation of solutions. We call this co-creative participation. However, participation in talk-based opinion formation and decision-making processes – we call this deliberative participation – is hardly a subject of discussion in the respective literature, although deliberative participation has been at the heart of participation research for several decades.
In this paper, we argue that co-creative and deliberative participation are two distinct forms of participation which can be conceptualized differently but are both relevant for successful experimentation in RWLs. Based on our practical experiences in the ‘real-world laboratory for sustainable mobility culture’ (RNM), we propose an ideal-typical conceptual framework for participation in RWLs that combines co-creative and deliberative participation, thereby aiming to contribute to a systematization of, and rationale for, different forms of participation in RWLs.
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