The ELABORATOR project aims to support cities across Europe in their transition to climate neutrality by promoting the implementation of mobility interventions towards inclusive, sustainable, safe and affordable mobility. The project aims to provide tools and methods to support a truly collaborative and participatory approach in achieving inclusive transport infrastructure development in 12 cities in Europe. The deliverable of T2.3, the ELABORATOR Co-creation playbook provides practical guidelines to engage groups of stakeholders and citizens in the development of qualitative data collection methods, comprising community-based and citizensscience research to ensure that the final methods and tools have legitimacy for all the parties involved in new and innovative urban interventions’ design and deployment. The playbook provides a solid foundation for the cities to work with co-creation methodologies to support the involvement of stakeholders and citizens, especially focusing on the inclusion of VRUs in co-creation processes. Hopefully these guidelines will also prove fruitful for other cities working with collaborative methods. 

The TwinAIR project is premised on the need for assessing indoor environment air quality and comfort towards evaluating health impacts and providing tools to different stakeholders to improve indoor conditions. Multiple pilots sites across Europe will be used to test digital tools and provide ground for environmental and health research. This paper describes the Swedish pilot where Linköping University (LiU) and its premises building management company Akademiska Hus (AH) jointly provide assets across two of LiU's campuses. The aim of this work is to provide a full account of the assets the Swedish Pilot of TwinAIR will mobilize, together with the rationale behind the selection of different scenarios that will be used to test the project tools and interventions, and to discuss how these address the needs and expectations of different local stakeholders involved.

Global demand for food, including rising consumption of meat and dairy products, is increasing pressure on the environment and natural resources, often in locations distant from points of consumption. To identify and quantify consumer driven impacts and the components of the supply chain where sustainability interventions will be most effective, spatially explicit consumption-linked indicators that encompass environmental risks are required. Large amounts of phosphorus fertilizers are used in Brazilian soybean cultivation, which potentially cause eutrophication and impact freshwater species. We use a sub-national trade model to develop a spatially explicit approach for assessing commodity-driven phosphorus fertilizer use and its potential impact on biodiversity linked to four key consumers. The use of phosphorus for embedded consumption per capita of Brazilian soybean in China, the EU, the UK, and Sweden are estimated at municipal level and combined with metrics that influence losses of phosphorus to create a normalised relative risk index. The relative risk index is presented in geospatial visualisations to explore geographical patterns of risk to freshwater biodiversity and make the link between consumer and producer countries less obscure. The results indicate high phosphorus-linked species risk in municipalities within Mato Grosso, Rio Grande do Sul, Paraná, and Goiás. Sweden and the UK generate the highest relative risk and the geographical patterns of risk differ between the investigated consuming countries, showing that smaller countries can have relatively large impacts at a spatially explicit scale. In the Amazon biome, risk of nutrient losses and biodiversity are relatively high, creating concerns as soybean production is expanding into the area. The results and methodological approach can contribute to understanding of accountability, agency, and increased transparency for the governance of global supply chains, necessary for enabling transformations towards sustainable food systems.

Food systems are central to global sustainability, while being complex systems where places and people are intertwined over large distances and at different scales. Transformations towards sustainable food systems have been called for in both research and policy, and Sweden and the European Union have declared high ambitions to act as global leaders in these transformations. While food production in Sweden and the European Union is often portrayed as largely sustainable in a global context, the region is highly dependent on food imports, with relatively large environmental footprints globally. This thesis aims to explore transformative pathways towards sustainability, with a particular focus on sustainable food systems, in a Swedish and European Union context. The thesis specifically studies the following research questions: (1) What constitutes transformations towards sustainability, and in particular sustainable food systems, from the perspectives of Swedish stakeholders, including food system practitioners, and European Union policy frameworks? (2) What roles, responsibilities, and agency do Swedish stakeholders, including food system practitioners and European Union policy frameworks, attribute to different actors? (3) How can interconnections and accountability in global food systems be understood and governed in light of societal transformations towards sustainability? (4) What are the implications for transformative pathways towards sustainability? The thesis builds on four papers that use focus group methodology (PI and PII), involving Swedish stakeholders, including food-system practitioners, analyses of European Green Deal policies (PII and PIII), and quantitative investigation of phosphorus fertiliser use in Brazilian soybean production and related biodiversity impacts (PIV). Four overarching conclusions are drawn from the findings: (I) Shared goals and consensus are emphasised as essential, while a diversity of transformative pathways and understandings of challenges and priorities needs to be recognised, with attention being paid to how specific choices might include and exclude pathways and actors. (II) Emerging shifts in how food is valued open up opportunities for transformative change in which the ‘true’ cost of food is acknowledged, alongside a recognition of non-economic values of food, which presupposes alignment at the practical, political, and personal levels. (III) The identified pathways comprise public accountability regimes, incentives for more sustainable consumption, regulations to reduce resource use and impacts of food production. (IV) The attribution of accountability to trading operators in the accountability regime proposed by the European Union highlights an extended focus from food production and consumption towards regulating flows and intermediate actors in food systems.

Livsmedelssystemen är centrala för global hållbarhet. Det är komplexa system där platser och människor är sammanlänkade över stora geografiska avstånd och på olika skalor. Transformationer mot hållbara livsmedelssystem har efterfrågats inom både forskning och politik, och i linje med detta har Sverige och den Europeiska unionen deklarerat höga ambitioner om att ta en global ledarroll i dessa transformationer. Livsmedelsproduktionen i Sverige och den Europeiska unionen beskrivs ofta som hållbar i en global kontext, samtidigt som den i hög grad är beroende av livsmedelsimport med relativt stora miljöavtryck globalt. Denna avhandling syftar till att utforska transformativa vägar mot hållbarhet med särskilt fokus på hållbara livsmedelssystem från ett svenskt perspektiv och ett EU-perspektiv. Avhandlingen studerar specifikt följande forskningsfrågor: (1) Vad innebär transformationer mot hållbarhet, och i synnerhet hållbara livsmedelssystem, utifrån svenska intressenters, inklusive aktörer aktiva i livsmedelssystem, perspektiv, och inom Europeiska unionens politiska ramverk? (2) Vilka roller, ansvar och handlingsutrymme tillskriver svenska intressenter, inklusive aktörer aktiva i livsmedelssystem, och EU:s politiska ramverk, olika aktörer? (3) Hur kan sammankopplingar och ansvarsskyldighet i globala livsmedelssystem förstås och styras i ljuset av samhälleliga transformationer mot hållbarhet? (4) Vilka är konsekvenserna för transformativa vägar mot hållbarhet? Avhandlingen består av fyra artiklar som bygger på fokusgruppsintervjuer med svenska aktörer, inklusive aktörer aktiva i livsmedelssystem (PI och PII), analyser av dokument inom ramen för den Europeiska gröna given (PII och PIII), och kvantitativ analys av fosforanvändning i Brasiliansk sojabönsproduktion och relaterade effekter på biologisk mångfald (PIV). Av resultaten dras fyra övergripande slutsatser: (I) Gemensamma mål och konsensus framhålls som grundläggande, samtidigt som materialet pekar på en mångfald av transformativa vägar och förståelser av utmaningar och prioriteringar. Dessa behöver erkännas och det krävs en medvetenhet om vilka vägar och aktörer som inkluderas eller exkluderas. (II) Framväxande skiften kring hur mat värderas öppnar möjligheter till transformativa förändringar där den "verkliga" kostnaden för mat synliggörs, som även omfattar ett erkännande av matens icke-ekonomiska värden, vilket förutsätter att dessa lieras i de praktiska, politiska och personliga sfärerna och kan samverka i linje med varandra. (III) Identifierade vägar mot hållbara livsmedelssystem omfattar offentliga ’accountability regimer’, incitament för mer hållbar konsumtion och regleringar för att minska resursanvändning i och effekter av livsmedelsproduktion. (IV) Regleringen av handelsoperatörer i av EU föreslagna ’accountability’ regimer belyser ett utökat fokus från livsmedelsproduktion och -konsumtion till att reglera flöden och mellanliggande aktörer i livsmedelssystemen.

This paper explores the potentials and limitations of transdisciplinary research on sustainability issues characterized by extensive uncertainty and complexity. Transdisciplinary approaches that support the co-creation of knowledge in collaboration between science and society are advocated in research that aims to explore pathways for societal transformations towards sustainability. However, there is limited research on how co-creation research plays out in practice and what are its implications, in particular with regards to how data collection and analysis can be developed to increase the quality and reliability of the research, and to the roles that researchers themselves play in shaping the research. This paper makes two contributions: First, it offers insight into the design and implementation of co-creation endeavors based on scholarly literature as well as experiences from a research program that seeks to support foresight capacity for sustainable development under geopolitical uncertainties. Second, the paper elaborates methodological support for co-creation research by highlighting the potential of co-dissemination for transdisciplinarity and arguing for a systematic approach to reflection and self-reflexivity. Specifically, the paper reflects on experiences from the ongoing Mistra Geopolitics research program, which explores the intersections between geopolitics and sustainable development, and where co-creation has been at the core since the start of the program. We explore three stages in transdisciplinary research: (i) co-design of the research agenda, (ii) co-production of knowledge, and (iii) co-dissemination. Specifically, we examine the role of non-academic partners, the role of knowledge brokers and facilitation, and the need for flexibility, adaptability and reflexivity throughout the process.

This study explores features of food system transformations towards sustainability in the Farm to Fork Strategy in relation toperspectives of Swedish food system practitioners. Transformations towards sustainable food systems are essential to achievethe United Nations’ 2030 Agenda and the need for more sustainable food systems has been recognised in the European GreenDeal and its Farm to Fork Strategy. The Swedish ambition to act as a global leader in achieving the 2030 Agenda and theEuropean Commission’s aspiration for Europe to lead global food system transformations offer a critical opportunity to studytransformational processes and agents of change in a high-income region with externalised environmental and sustainabilityimpacts. Drawing on theories of complex systems transformations, this study identifies features of food system transformations,exploring places to intervene and examines the roles, responsibilities, and agency related to these changes. The resultsof this study provide three main conclusions highlighting (i) alignment of high-level policy and the perspectives of nationalpractitioners at the paradigm level, especially concerning how food is valued, which is a crucial first step for transformationalprocesses to come about (ii) a lack of clarity as well as diversity of pathways to transform food systems although commonobjectives are expressed, and (iii) governance mechanisms as enablers for a diversity of transformations. Moreover, theseprocesses must acknowledge the contextual and complex nature of food systems and the level of agency and power of actors.