wp3 / DC2

Scaling out public participation and co-design practices for climate transitions

This PhD position centres on the study of co-design practices for climate transitions involving public organisations, adopting a systemic perspective and investigating how they acquire new knowledge and capabilities to support their transformation.

Anna’s PhD research investigates how design practices support the implementation of systemic approaches to achieve climate neutrality and how they foster organizational learning within European municipalities, enabling the internalisation of design capabilities. Focusing on cities participating in the EU Mission for 100 Climate-Neutral and Smart Cities, the research examines how design supports sensemaking, collaboration, and learning in complex transition processes. Adopting a qualitative, comparative case study approach, the study explores how design-related practices and capabilities emerge, are adapted, and become embedded within everyday organisational routines to support the implementation of systemic approaches to climate neutrality. By analysing municipal transition teams and their ways of working, the research aims to generate empirically grounded insights into how design can contribute to long-term organisational change and capability building for climate transitions.

1) Analyse existing frameworks for introducing public participation and co-design in public administration, examining adoption and scaling.
2) Investigate and map current strategies to scale public participation and co-design practices for climate transitions in public administration across different European and global contexts (through case studies).
3) Triangulate information to develop a framework at the intersection of co-design, policy science, transitions, and design for sustainability to scale up co-design and public participation for climate transitions in public administration, with a special focus on capability building and organisational change.

The theoretical and methodological structure of the project will be developed at the Department of Design of Politecnico di Milano in close collaboration with funded research projects. This will require the candidate to engage in practice-based research and case studies, as well as to enhance or develop new theoretical conceptual frameworks and guidelines for organisational change and capacity building to institutionalise public participation and co-design for climate transition.

Democratic Society (Belgium) (3 months) with mentor Elizabeth Calderon, to refine and validate the knowledge landscape and collect/enrich the pool of cases for analysis.
Climate-KIC (Denmark) (6 months) with mentor Dr Carolina Giraldo to test and validate the analysis of cases and the initial proposal of framework with public administrations across Europe leveraging/involving the extensive EU-wide network of Climate-KIC in at least 3 countries.