Inclusiveness
Who takes part and who is left out, and how to design participation that reaches and values diverse voices.
What we do
Research clusters
The families of participation processes we design and run. Open one to read more and explore its actions.
Citizen science opens up research to the people it affects. Instead of treating the public as subjects to be measured, we invite citizens to help frame the questions, gather and interpret data, and make sense of the results alongside researchers. In TIAS lab, research actions usually focus on finding ways of living well within ecological limits. Most of these actions run through the Postgrowth Citizen Science Network.
Explore actionsA citizen assembly brings together a small, broadly representative group of residents to learn about an issue, weigh the trade-offs and agree on concrete policies and recommendations. Selected to reflect the wider community, participants deliberate with balanced information and real time to think, rather than simply voting or answering a survey. We design and facilitate these processes and study how they unfold, how people move towards shared positions, and how their proposals travel into actual decisions.
Explore actionsMany challenges cut across public bodies, researchers, businesses and civil society, with each group holding a different piece of the picture. Multi-stakeholder engagement brings these actors to a common table instead of consulting them in isolation, so tensions surface early and responses are built together. We convene and facilitate these processes and draw out transferable lessons about what makes collaboration work in practice.
Explore actionsStakeholder needs and public administration processes often run in parallel without meaningfully intersecting. Scientific evidence, for example, does not always inform public decisions, while decision-making is not always grounded in the best available evidence. This cluster examines how spaces for collaborative governance can be created so that diverse publics can contribute to policy and decision-making alongside public administrations. The aim is to foster better-informed and more responsive governance, enabling public decisions to reflect a wider range of interests, forms of knowledge and needs.
Explore actionsCo-creation workshops and focus groups are how we listen closely and design with people rather than for them. In small, guided sessions, participants share how they perceive an issue, react to early proposals and help shape new ideas, often through hands-on formats and serious games.
Explore actions
What we study
Research lines
The cross-cutting questions that run through everything we do, whatever the cluster.
Micro-design
The small design choices in a participatory process (formats, facilitation, materials, timing) and how they shape what people can contribute.
Power
How participation can either reproduce existing power relations or help to transform them.
Sustainability transitions
What role public participation plays in the shift towards more sustainable societies, and how much it really contributes.
Our approach
Plurality, experimentation and transformation
For us, participation is not about adding voices to a closed process. It is an open loop where perspectives, knowledge and public action interweave. We treat the real world as a living laboratory: we don't just run participation processes, we observe, test and study what works and why.
Our themes sit at the edge of social science and sustainability: postgrowth innovation, the right to repair, democracy, feminism and ecological limits. The goal is participation that is meaningful for people and rigorous for research.
More about the lab
Plurality
Diverse people, experiences and ways of understanding a shared problem.
Diverse people, experiences and ways of understanding a shared problem.
Experimentation
A space for dialogue, research, deliberation, testing and shared learning.
A space for dialogue, research, deliberation, testing and shared learning.
Transformation
The capacity to produce public, institutional and social change.
The capacity to produce public, institutional and social change.
Want to take part?
Whether you are a citizen, a researcher, an institution or a journalist, there is a way to get involved with TIAS lab.