How PHAROS’s Nine Living Labs Decide Restoration

• November 10, 2026

A Living Lab is not a demonstration site with an engagement budget bolted on. Within PHAROS it is the machinery through which marine restoration work gets decided, rather than the stage where it gets shown. That distinction decides whether anything outlives the funding.

At each site, the Living Labs help local actors co-develop and manage nature-based solutions and restoration work alongside the consortium’s researchers. Residents take part, and so do fishers, teachers, business owners and local government officials. They run as local hubs where people test ideas and shape solutions that fit their own coastline.

One line of the stated objective is worth keeping almost word for word, because the project has set itself a test with it: solutions that are locally wanted, locally owned and durable. The first two you can check during the project. The third can only be assessed once it has ended, and that is the honest difficulty with the whole model.

Nine sites, two tiers

PHAROS runs nine Living Labs: three demonstration sites and six replication sites.

Each tier has a different job. Demonstration sites build and stress-test the methods. Replication sites take what worked and adapt it, which is where transferability actually gets answered. A method that only functions in the place that invented it has little policy value.

The method underneath

Every site works from one framework, adapted from the European Network of Living Labs. It runs in five phases: co-define the scope, engage stakeholders, design actions collaboratively, assess risk and capacity, then plan the co-creation, with monitoring running the whole way through. Beside it sit a stakeholder engagement strategy, a co-creation approach and integration with the MINKA citizen science platform. Sites adapt all of this locally, with support from the relevant work package.

Several labs describe their governance as a quadruple helix of public authorities, business, academia and civil society, then extend it to a quintuple helix that treats the environment as a stakeholder in its own right. In practice that is a way of seating the natural system at a table it cannot attend.

Data, Programmes, Method: Three Ways the Living Labs Power PHAROS Project

The Living Lab pages don’t publish a target-by-target map against the project’s objectives [TO CONFIRM: whether a published objectives matrix exists]. What they do show is three mechanisms by which the labs feed the wider project.

They generate data. Observations collected through MINKA at each site build up a record of biodiversity and pressures that no single research team could assemble, and the site pages describe that data flowing into the project’s digital twin and its marine protected area network work.

They deliver the thematic programmes. Fisher Guardians, the Citizen Litter Entrepreneur programme and the Blue Schools network aren’t stand-alone campaigns. They run through the labs, which supply the local relationships that make recruitment possible at all.

They produce transferable method. Site experience feeds the PHAROS Living Lab implementation guide, which is the output most likely to outlive the project.

Mission Ocean and Waters: Living Labs Turn EU Ocean Targets into Community-Scale Evidence, and Build Consent Before Designation

Funding comes through the EU Mission “Restore our Ocean and Waters by 2030”, whose quantified targets include at least 50% less plastic litter at sea, 30% fewer microplastics released and 50% lower nutrient losses. The Living Labs are where those numbers meet an actual coastline.

The connection runs both ways. Downwards, Mission targets give each site a reason to put litter prevention, nutrient management and habitat condition ahead of activity that is more visible but harder to measure. Upwards, the labs supply evidence that mission-scale ambition is implementable at community scale, including evidence of where it isn’t. Several sites tie their monitoring to ecological corridors across the Atlantic and Arctic basins, which is the scale at which networks of protected areas, as opposed to single reserves, start to work.

One further alignment is easy to miss. The standard criticism of area-based conservation is the “paper park”: a designation with no management, no enforcement and no local consent behind it. A Living Lab is, in effect, an attempt to build the consent before the designation instead of after it.

Where the model is vulnerable

Co-creation is slow, and the community sets the pace, not the reporting calendar. Three of the nine labs are still being defined or launched. For a five-year project that is normal, but it leaves a short runway for replication evidence.

Attribution is hard too. When a dune recovers or a litter stream thins out, separating the Living Lab’s contribution from existing local work, regulation and the weather isn’t straightforward. And durability, the central claim, can’t be verified before 2029. The useful thing for a reader to watch isn’t launch announcements. It is whether communities keep using the platforms and the collection points in the months when nothing is scheduled.