Place-based evaluation in Living Labs: designing tools for collective learning.

Living labs in agroecosystem transition contexts have gained significant popularity, yet
little scientific attention has been given to monitoring and improving these institutions, including the process of setting them up. As suggested by the literature, it is imperative that research agendas be established to effectively evaluate such living labs, taking into account the challenges of interventions in different contexts and the participation of local actors in the evaluation process. We critically inspect the implementation of a living lab's monitoring, evaluation, and learning process in the context of a "One Health" project, Santés & Territoires. The project involves six living labs established after local actors identified the main challenges related to socio-ecological health issues. Transversal to the national specificities, a fourfold multi-component monitoring, evaluation, and learning process is being proposed : (1) a protocol of observation of collective actions taking place during living labs, (2) a set of semi-directed interviews with facilitators and focal points to gather their personal experiences and standpoints of the living lab process, (3) the creation of field notebooks through iterative and collaborative efforts with local actors and investigators, and (4) satellite approaches reflecting program/project-oriented evaluation and local living lab capacities. We discuss the challenges of implementing such interdisciplinary/ transdisciplinary research and participatory action research approaches in a project-based society. We take a reflective and situated perspective on the limits and opportunities for improving the monitoring and evaluation of living labs. Our argument is that it is important to understand changing local contexts in order to systematically refine tools adjusting to emerging needs of the participating population, in particular under the utilization-focused developmental evaluation framework. Lessons learned that involve continued iterative process of monitoring and evaluation, issue-driven process, and ongoing improvement of monitoring and evaluation interventions are sketched. This could provide foundations for research and practice, supporting the development and testing of monitoring and place-based evaluation tools for living labs implementation.