Towards a Carbon Governance Living Lab: Designing and Testing Local Decarbonization Governance Experiments
Project overview
This project aims to investigate local decarbonization initiatives through the lens of 'governance experiments'. These are purposeful interventions designed to address climate change and decarbonization imperatives in municipalities, with the intention to innovate and learn from best practices. Despite the implementation of many carbon governance experiments across Canada in response to municipal climate action mandates, there is a lack of systematic research on how different governance strategies facilitate transitions to net-zero communities. Local actors in Canada are engaging in initiatives to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, taking the form of institutional experiments (e.g., multi-stakeholder partnerships, innovative collaborative platforms, new funding arrangements) and intervention experiments (behavior-changing policies and practices). The living lab model presents an opportunity to design, test and evaluate these governance experiments, both as a novel institutional platform and as a testing ground for innovative interventions.
Key project details
| Principal investigator | Adriane MacDonald, associate professor, Management, and Canada Research Chair in Governance and Sustainability, Concordia University |
Co-principal investigators |
Alexandra Lesnikowski, assistant professor, Geography, Planning and Environment, Concordia University; Raymond Paquin, professor, Management, Concordia University; Damon Matthews, professor, Geography, Planning and Environment, and Concordia Research Chair in Climate Science and Sustainability, Concordia University |
Research collaborators |
Ursula Eicker, Caroline Hachem-Vermette, Baron Tymas, Louise Caroline Bergeron, Jennifer Garard, Rébecca Gelly-Cyr, Patrick Dubé, Sébastien Parent-Durand, Luce Beaulieu, Ayse Turak, Renato Lago, Pereira Chaves, Michèle Paulin, Benjamin Docquiere and Joel Bothello |
| Non-academic collaborators | Front Commun pour la transition énergétique (FTCÉ), Conseil Régional de l’Environnement de Montréal (CRE Montréal), Alliance des corporations d’habitations abordables du territoire du Grand Montréal (ACHAT), Vivre en Ville |
| Research Keywords | Decarbonization, climate action, governance experiments, multi-stakeholder collaboration, living labs, resilient communities, robust action |
| Budget | Cash: $257,700 In-Kind: $234,331 |
Publications:
H. Jadidi, A. MacDonald, A. Soliz, and U. Eicker, “Assessing the effectiveness of municipal climate actions: A scoring system for residential energy retrofit initiatives,” Energy Policy, vol. 208, p. 114885, Jan. 2026, doi: 10.1016/j.enpol.2025.114885.
A. MacDonald, V. W. Fenters, M. M. Luciano, and S. Dann, “Navigating Representational Gaps: Traversing Construal Levels and Investing in Uncertainty,” Personnel Psychology, vol. 78, no. 4, pp. 771–793, Dec. 2025, doi: 10.1111/peps.70006.
L. Stadtler, E. Hernandez, H. H. Knight, A. MacDonald, O. Hustad, and M. M. Seitanidi, “Removing Rose-Tinted Glasses: Uncovering the Dark Side Effects of Cross-Sector Partnerships,” Proceedings, vol. 2025, no. 1, p. 10668, July 2025, doi: 10.5465/AMPROC.2025.180bp.
M. Young, G. A. Tanguay, A. MacDonald, Y. Zhou, and A. Giordano, “Navigating municipal dynamics: unraveling the political threads in Canadian transport decarbonization policies,” Transport Policy, vol. 171, pp. 128–139, Sept. 2025, doi: 10.1016/j.tranpol.2025.05.023.
L. Stadtler et al., “Cross‐Sector Partnerships to Address Societal Grand Challenges: Systematizing Differences in Scholarly Analysis,” J Management Studies, p. joms.13053, Feb. 2024, doi: 10.1111/joms.13053.
Accepted publications in national and international conferences:
A. MacDonald, A. Soliz, and S. Jodoin, “Matters of care in transportation: Toward anti-ableist transitions,” presented at the AAG Annual Meeting 2025, Mar. 2025. [Online]. Available: https://www.aag.org/events/aag2025/
Reports:
A. MacDonald, “Roadmap to Designing Living Lab Governance Structures and Implementation Processes,” 2025.
Research focus
Develop an open-access database of decarbonization initiatives
This project will identify and document local 'carbon governance experiments' in communities across Canada. By creating a comprehensive database of local initiatives, this project improves access to data about such projects, expediting their progress and expansion.
Establish a carbon governance living lab
The Living Lab will allow researchers and partners to codesign, test and evaluate the efficacy of governance experiments to address challenges related to facilitating affordable and inclusive habitats. This contributes to building resilient decarbonized communities by creating a testing ground where novel interventions can be tested and assessed through action research projects, co-designed and implemented by lab partners.
Create a replicable carbon governance framework
The overall goal of this project is to identify and design decarbonization interventions that mobilize local stakeholders and change behaviour towards resilient and inclusive decarbonized communities. The aim is to create a replicable framework based on lessons learned from the pilot living lab and the database of carbon governance experiments.
Non-academic partners
Thank you to our non-academic partners for your support and trust.
Funding
Volt-Age is funded by a $123-million grant from the Canada First Research Excellence Fund.
