GLOCULL - Globally and LOCally sustainable food-water-energy innovation in Urban Living Labs

Challenges in food, water and energy systems are locally and globally connected. For local actors, including cities, it is difficult to anticipate whether solutions to one issue in the FWE-nexus are sustainable across food, water and energy systems, both at the local and the global scale. Over the past decade we have witnessed a remarkable turn from the global to the local scale in sustainable development. There has been an explosion of sustainable urban development initiatives focussing on local, circular and renewable production of food, energy and water. There has also been much progress in methodologies to develop locally-robust solutions in Urban Living Labs (ULL).

The GLOCULL project therefore aims to develop an Urban Living Lab approach for innovations in the FWE nexus that are locally and globally sustainable. To support future implementation of this approach, guidelines and a participatory assessment tool kit will be developed through co-creation in Urban Living Labs in 7 countries, based on an integrated assessment of local-global interactions in the FWE nexus and transdisciplinary action-research in the local Living Labs. 

The GLOCULL project aims:

• To develop an extended co-creative Urban Living Lab approach for locally and globally sustainable innovations in the FWE nexus.
• To support the implementation of this approach, through co-creation processes in 7 Urban Living Labs, in cities both in the Global South and the Global North.

A novel Urban Living Lab methodology will be developed through a combination of:

• Transdisciplinary action-research in local Urban Living Labs with a focus on co-creation and learning
• An integrated assessment of the local-global interactions in the FWE nexus

ULL methodology for globally and locally-sustainable Food-Water-Energy Innovations

•  Implementation guidelines
•  A participatory tool kit to assess ULL FWE innovations
•  Supporting co-creation processes
•  Insights in potential of ULL as an adaptive governance mechanism for the FWE nexus

GLOCULL is funded via SUGI (Sustainable Urbanisation Global Initiative) which provides a unique collaboration framework between JPI Urban Europe and the Belmont Forum, supported by the European Commission. To find out more about the project see here and here