Promoting coastal resilience through participation and Living Labs within the mareXtreme mission

The paper develops a conceptual framework for how participatory Living Labs can function as transdisciplinary research infrastructures to strengthen coastal resilience to marine extreme events, using the German DAM mission mareXtreme as its empirical anchor. It traces the evolution of Living Labs from early user‑centred design and ICT testbeds in Scandinavian and US contexts to contemporary European, sustainability‑oriented real‑world laboratories, highlighting conceptual ambiguity and tensions between technology‑driven experimentation and transformative social innovation. Building on this, the authors clarify key terminology around participation and co‑processes (co‑creation, co‑design, co‑development, co‑evaluation, co‑production) and align these with recent participation typologies that foreground power relations and structural inequalities in climate and sustainability research. The framework is operationalized through four mareXtreme projects that apply Living Lab approaches to distinct hazard–society interfaces and governance scales along the land–sea gradient, with an explicit focus on whole‑of‑society engagement beyond technically mandated authorities. Synthesizing these cases, the paper identifies opportunities (e.g. co‑production of context‑specific risk knowledge, community‑owned preparedness strategies, improved science–policy interfaces) alongside structural challenges such as fragmented responsibilities, risk communication under deep uncertainty, volatile engagement and persistent participation gaps. It concludes that coastal Living Labs should be designed as long‑term, reflexive and inclusive infrastructures that integrate sustainability‑oriented community development with technological innovation and foreground co‑creation and shared agency, or else risk reproducing existing inequalities in coastal risk governance.