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Abstract
Much has been written about innovations arising from what has been dubbed “living laboratories” (or LivingLabs) for sustainable energy transitions, especially in the global North and, in particular, in their urban contexts. Yet, Southern- and rural-oriented LivingLabs, which also exist, remain less documented and assessed. LivingLab stories and the sociotechnical experiments being co-produced in these spaces in the context of energy transition can offer opportunities for advancing and reflecting upon how the energy transition agenda can be scaled and accelerated in the context of our temporally specific climate mitigation needs. This paper narrows this gap by presenting a case analysis of what can be argued as an in-situ LivingLab for community energy transition in understudied rural Southeast Asia. Using data from ethnographic field study, focus group discussions, and face-to-face interviews, this paper describes the emergence and co-production of a community-based energy transition in a rural Thai community as a LivingLab, examining this innovation and underlining the ways in which this practice has become a collaboratory—a co-produced sociotechnical laboratory that extended public engagement to citizen empowerment.
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Acknowledgments
This paper is produced as an output of the future of energy in developing countries’ project at the Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future at Boston University. I acknowledge and thank the generous people of Pa Deng for their time and participation in the study, and Cynthia Barakatt for her comments in the early version of thepaper.
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Division of Environment and Sustainability, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Clear Water Bay, Kowloon, Hong Kong
Laurence L. Delina
Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future, Boston University, 67 Bay State Road, Boston, MA, 02215, USA
Laurence L. Delina
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Correspondence toLaurence L. Delina.
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Delina, L.L. A rural energy collaboratory: co-production in Thailand’s community energy experiments.J Environ Stud Sci10, 83–90 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13412-019-00572-x
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