Sustainability concepts for digital research infrastructures developed through ground-level stakeholder empowerment

TL;DR

This paper explores how engaging ground-level stakeholders through workshops can foster sustainable practices in digital research infrastructures, emphasizing community-driven change for energy and resource efficiency.

Contribution

It introduces a workshop-based method for stakeholder empowerment to co-create sustainable transition concepts in digital research infrastructures.

Findings

Stakeholder engagement via workshops promotes bottom-up climate action.

Guided, expert-integrated workshops effectively define sustainability challenges.

Community-driven approaches can complement top-down policies for sustainability.

Abstract

The UK Research and Innovation Digital Research Infrastructure (DRI) needs to operate sustainably in the future, encompassing its use of energy and resources, and embedded computer hardware carbon emissions. Transition concepts towards less unsustainable operations will inform the future design and operations of DRI. A problem remains that, while the skills and knowledge for solving net zero challenges already exist within the UK's DRI community, the mechanisms for sharing them and enabling behavior change are missing. Without adopting community-driven approaches, individual stakeholders may feel isolated and uncertain about how to play their role in the transition. A research programme was funded to give voice to the ground-level stakeholders of the DRI ecosystem for the co-creation of carbon downshift concepts. This article presents the results of the programme, with the goal to inform a fair and just transition from the ground-level, complementing the top-down interventions of energy efficiency policies and renewable energies integration. A workshop-based innovation method was developed for researching stakeholder recommendations and perspectives on the sustainable transition of the UK's DRI. We find that giving a purposeful voice to the stakeholders for shaping their own future sustainable DRI environment can be achieved by a guided, expert-integrated, interactive and problem-focused workshop series. The chosen workshop design is impactful on creating bottom-up agency for climate action by first defining the high-level problems of unsustainability in energy and fossil-fuel consumption, and then connecting them to the ground-level circumstances of DRI stakeholders. This approach to stakeholder management should initiate a sustainable transition that promises to kick-start impactful changes from within communities, adding to high-level efforts from economics, policy, and governance.