Net Zero Precincts Stage 3: Activating

Net Zero Precincts is a four-year Australian Research Council (ARC) Linkage project that brings together two key areas of research for the first time — transition management and design anthropology — to develop a new interdisciplinary approach to transitioning urban environments to net zero. The project uses the Monash University Clayton Campus and Monash Technology Precinct as an action-oriented Living Lab to experiment, test and learn in a real-world setting.

The project aims to develop and validate a new and transferrable approach for net zero transitions informed by the real-life experiences of the precinct community and its businesses, government, knowledge sector and civil society actors. As such, it will provide significant benefits to organisations and individuals seeking to engage with and learn from everyday people about community needs and aspirations in accelerating urban transitions.

In this report we share details of the Living Lab that was developed to accelerate net zero precinct transitions across domains including energy, mobility, buildings, governance and data and build capability for a new style of collaborative and place-based transition governance. This report presents an overview of the Living Lab’s structure, cycles of engagement, theory of change and the monitoring and evaluation approach that was used to support reflexive learning. The Living Lab grew to 10 teams through a portfolio of experiments that ran over the course of 2024 and 2025.

The Transformative Outcomes approach was used to enable experiment leads to re-calibrate their experiments and harness appropriate leverage points to promote learning, networking, navigate expectations, institutional change and actor empowerment. This report shows researchers, policymakers and practitioners how diverse actors can be brought together through a Living Lab using a portfolio-based approach to trial experiments that generate transformative outcomes to drive systems change in precinct settings.