EXPLORING COLLABORATIVE INNOVATION APPROACHES AS CO-PRODUCTION POLICY TOOLS: LEARNING FROM CANADA'S AGROECOSYSTEM LIVING LABS.

In 2018, Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada developed the Living Laboratories Initiative, a network of agroecosystem living labs, to encourage the adoption and scaling up and out of innovation in climate change adaptation and mitigation in agriculture. This paper explores agroecosystem living labs as new collaborative innovation approaches used as co-production policy tools to co-create solutions to complex agri-environmental issues. It answers the question: How can living labs, especially agroecosystem living labs, help us understand more about the co-production processes between public and private actors? Using a combination of semi-structured interviews and participant observation, this study gathered early-stage insights from various agroecosystem living lab partners in two Canadian agroecosystem living lab sites. It found that starting conditions of partners are informative in the initial stages of living lab implementation. Three lessons are identified for other public sector actors looking to use living labs as co-production tools targeting agroecosystems: first metagovernance is essential to a well-functioning agroecosystem living lab; second, it is useful to regularly reflect on power balances within the living lab and closer self-reflection by the metagovernor is important; lastly, social iteration is a useful "check-in" tool to use in addition to any other innovation iterations in the living lab. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]