New sustainable energy solutions have so far been largely limited to pilot projects focusing on specific technologies, organizational solutions or business models. How do we ensure that successful projects don't stop there - that good solutions are scaled up and spread? This is what the research project "Beyond Pilot Projects" will explore.
The research project, which is part of the Swedish Energy Agency's research program MESAM (Man, Energy System, Society), started in the spring of 2024 and is led by KTH in close collaboration with the Viable Cities program office. It examines how collaboration and common goals can be created between different projects and how overall regulations and governance can be designed to provide better conditions for scaling. To find this out, initiatives for sustainable heating systems in Lund, as well as initiatives for sustainable renovation of buildings in Malmö are studied. Madrid and Amsterdam will contribute with international case studies.
The project aims to demonstrate how to create systemic change initiatives in cities that go beyond pilot projects and how individual projects can hook into and reinforce each other, as well as explore what overarching system-level conditions can enable initiatives to grow into a broader transformation. The project will also explore how projects can be evaluated not only for their concrete results but also for their transformative potential.
In March, the project group gathered for a kickoff in Lund.
- "We need to understand what it takes for innovative solutions tested on a small scale to grow into the new normal throughout the city," says Rebecka Engström, a researcher in the project, working at KTH and Viable Cities.
'Beyond Pilot Projects' complements several other, parallel, initiatives in the same direction, such as 'Sustainability becomes standard', a tool developed by IVL that can be used in the planning process to ensure the potential for scaling up already there. Viable Cities and Vinnova's system demonstrator initiative are also exploring how cross-sectoral change work in parts of Lund and Stockholm can create system change beyond individual projects. This is also being tested in other countries, for example through system demonstrators in Brazil, Colombia, Uganda and the UK within the Climate Smart Cities Challenge, in which Viable Cities is involved. The EU Climate KIC initiative "Deep Demonstrations" is another example where test beds are being developed for system transformation in cities.
'Beyond pilots' focuses more on the environment and spaces around existing pilot efforts in cities - such as communication, forms of cooperation, policies and investment directives - with case studies in Malmö and Lund, and how this environment can be shaped so that projects with different main purposes still contribute to the same overall goal, in this case the mission of climate-neutral cities by 2030. In this way, this project complements other past and ongoing initiatives.
