Citizens and urban policy makers are experimenting with collaborative ways to tackle wicked urban issues, such as today’s sustainability challenges. In this article, we consider one particular way of collaboration in an experimental setting: Urban Living Labs (ULLs). ULLs are understood as spatially embedded sites for the co-creation of knowledge and solutions by conducting local experiments. As such, ULLs are supposed to offer an arena for reflexive, adaptive, and multi-actor learning environments, where new practices of self-organization and novel (infra-) structures can be tested within their real-world context. Yet, it remains understudied how the co-creation of knowledge and practices actually takes place within ULLs, and how co-creation unfolds their impacts. Hence, this paper focuses on co-creation dynamics in urban living labs, its associated learning and knowledge generation, and how these possibly contribute to urban sustainability transitions. We analyzed empirical data from a series of in-depth interviews and were actively involved with ULLs in the Rotterdam-The Hague region in the Netherlands. Our findings show five distinct types of co-creation elements that relate to specific dynamics of participation, facilitation, and organization. We conclude with a discussion on the ambivalent role of contextualized knowledge and the implications for sustainability transitions.

Hybrid organizations mix the characteristics of state, market, and civil society. Critics have suggested that such organizations pose severe risks to the public sector, both financially and culturally. However, these assertions are based mostly on theoretical claims or single case studies. No systematic evidence has been collected to support them. The findings of a large research program in The Netherlands in several policy fields show that the concerns over hybrid organizations appear to be overstated, since theoretically defined risks have not materialized. Conditions such as the presence of active regulators and a high degree of professionalism appear to dampen the risks.

Hybridity has become a widely-used concept in public management theory and practice. Yet, there is limited insight in what constitutes a hybrid organization. This article argues that it is not enough to say an organization is hybrid; you need to say how an organization is hybrid, as organizations can mix the characteristics of state and market on several dimensions and with differing intensities. They all have, as it were, a distinctive hybrid thumbprint, which can influence an organization’s performance and hence the quality of its service provision. Therefore, a model is presented to visualize this unique thumbprint.

Guest editorial: Social enterprises and public organizations: allies of adversaries? Introduction to special issue - Author: Philip Marcel Karré

Increasingly, hybridity, i.e., the combination of contrasting and conflicting elements within organizations, is seen as a way to create innovation and synergy in dealing with complex societal questions, leading to more sustainable development. Much research on the subject deals with the phenomenon of social enterprise, but hybridity also takes place in other, more traditional organizational settings. For example, many governments have created hybrid organizations by embracing new public management (NPM) as a way to overcome the perceived shortcomings of traditional, hierarchical forms of public administration, such as inefficiency and the lack of an entrepreneurial spirit. Here, hybridity is often not so much seen as a way to increase sustainability but rather as a way to cut cost and to increase the quality of service provision. This article adds the sustainability dimension to this discussion through a deductive approach, reinterpreting the results from a study on the effects of the hybridity of three municipal waste management organizations in the Netherlands. The main conclusions are that hybridity leads to a more professional management style but also to more attention on output than on outcome. The article discusses what this means in terms of pursuing sustainability and sustainable development.