Biowaste Reality Lab in Sevan Community
Implemented in the framework of Sweden-funded Waste Policy Armenia Program of the AUA Acopian Center for the Environment.
The Biowaste Reality Lab in Sevan is a practical application of the AUA Reality Lab model, designed to address complex sustainability challenges using a systems thinking approach. Implemented under the Waste Policy Armenia Program, the lab functions as a social innovation platform to foster interdisciplinary collaboration among faculty, students, municipality, civil society, and private stakeholders.
The lab provides a controlled environment in which the challenge—biowaste management in Sevan—is intentionally structured, while real-life variables remain open and evolving. It serves as a space where diverse perspectives are brought together to deeply understand the system, design adaptive solutions, and create lasting, community-owned impact.
Goals and Objectives
The Biowaste Reality Lab aims to:
- Drive systemic change in Sevan’s biowaste management by fostering cross-sector collaboration.
- Create a holistic understanding of the problem through continuous listening, engagement, and collective interpretation with system actors.
- Co-design and prototype interconnected solutions, enabling local implementation and collective ownership.
- Establish a learning and adaptation loop to iterate, scale, and inform future policy and practice.
Methodology and Systems Thinking Tools
The Market System Doughnut was selected as the conceptual framework for this study. It provides a structured way to map all relevant actors, while also identifying the supporting functions and governing rules required for the system to succeed. These elements include infrastructure, information, skills and technology, related services, as well as regulations, standards, laws, and informal norms. As demonstrated in the study, all recommendations derived from the research are organized within these categories, alongside the corresponding stakeholders.
The lab follows a four-phase approach grounded in systems thinking and adaptive learning. Waste Policy Armenia Program applied the following phases of the Reality Lab approach in Sevan:
Stakeholder Mapping
The team identified key system actors across the public, private, academic, and civic sectors.
Social Listening and System Understanding
- Nine focus group discussions were conducted with community members, youth, elderly, educators, public institutions, NGOs, and businesses.
- The existing biowaste landscape in Sevan has been mapped and deep insights extracted.
- The collected insights were analyzed into 6 collective personas and 13 narrative maps, capturing both visible and hidden narratives around waste behavior, values, and systemic barriers.
Collective Interpretation and Co-creation
A co-creation workshop was organized to bring together stakeholders from government, civil society, the private sector, and the expert community. Together, they jointly validated and enriched the insights. Then the stakeholders in mixed groups developed potential interconnected solutions, specifically targeting food and biowaste management challenges in Sevan.
Prototyping and Learning
Next steps include supporting stakeholders to collectively implement the co-designed pilots, with continuous monitoring and adaptation. Learnings from all phases will feed into a collective intelligence process, enabling informed decision-making, improved prototypes, and future scaling.
Tools Used in the Reality Lab
- Stakeholder Mapping & Engagement Framework
- Social Listening Toolkit (interview guides, persona-making templates, narrative mapping)
- Co-Creation Workshop Guide and Social Business Model Canvas
- Monitoring, Evaluation, and Learning (MEL) Framework with learning logs
- Collective Intelligence Generation Tools
The Ultimate Aim
The Biowaste Reality Lab in Sevan seeks to enable residents of Sevan to co-create, co-implement, and co-own sustainable solutions to biowaste challenges. By embedding systems thinking, interdisciplinary collaboration, and participatory learning at its core, the lab contributes to a behavioral change and further cultural shift: from fragmented efforts to collective, adaptive, and scalable action for sustainable waste management in Armenia. The small-scale solutions implemented in the framework of the lab can incite a bottom-up demand for a larger community- or province-scale solutions, such as, for example, a centralized bio-waste-to-biogas plant.
Read more about the approach here: www.enoll.org/living-labs
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Read the highlights on the AUA Newsroom