What It Takes to Transform a Sector

Lessons from the Live Labs project

By Ilektra Kouloumpi, Sectors Lead at Doughnut Economics Action Lab

In collaboration with Kristin Strandberg, Cities Lead at Circle Economy

1. The problem with sectors: complex systems of systems 

Every sector — highways, food, energy, housing — is more than an industry. It is a living system: a web of organisations, habits, policies, materials, and relationships that follow market dynamics, built up over decades to meet human needs. And precisely because of that, sectors are incredibly hard to change.

I have been working as an advisor to local governments and organisations for the past 15 years, with a growing focus on Doughnut Economics for the past nine. Before stepping into my current role as Sectors Lead at Doughnut Economics Action Lab, I was on the ground - as a hands-on consultant in different cities and sectoral initiatives. One of the most formative was the Live Labs project in the UK. Together with the counties of Cornwall, Hampshire, and Somerset, we set out to do something new: apply Doughnut Economics to an entire sector, and help transform highways into something both socially just and ecologically safe.

That experience - getting into the detail, sitting with the people doing the work, watching what actually moved and what didn’t - taught us a lot about what sectoral transformation really takes.

This is what we learned.

2. From framework to highways: the Live Labs project

When I first joined the Live Labs project, someone asked me: how do you turn an economic framework into something a highways engineer can actually use on a Monday morning? That question stayed with me throughout the whole project.

The ADEPT Live Labs 2 project brought together three English county councils — Cornwall, Hampshire, and Somerset — with Circle Economy, Colas, and academic partners, with a clear ambition: to apply Doughnut Economics to the UK highways sector for the first time, and develop practical tools that help authorities make decisions that balance people and planet.

The project produced three concrete outcomes. A Strategic Tool to help authorities assess their plans and contracts. A Project Tool to evaluate individual roadworks schemes. And the Highways Doughnut Alliance — a cross-sector group bringing together local highway authorities, central government, contractors, suppliers, academia, and community groups to collectively identify the systemic barriers holding the sector back and co-develop pathways for change. Both tools and the work of the Alliance are freely available for anyone to use and build on.

3. Three levels, one transformation: how Live Labs worked across all of them

Looking back at the project, I can now see that we were working on transformation in three distinct and interconnected ways - though we didn’t always name them clearly at the time. The Sectors, Let’s Get Started guide from Doughnut Economics Action Lab describes these as three levels at which sectoral transformation can happen. Live Labs touched all three.

Enabling whole-sector transformation

The biggest and most systemic level. It is about bringing together the actors who shape the sector as a whole — across the value chain, across organisations, across levels of government — to surface deep systemic barriers and build a shared direction. In Live Labs, this was the Alliance: creating a space where local highway authorities, central government, contractors, suppliers, and community groups — who don’t normally sit in the same room — could have honest conversations about what is really holding the sector back. The outcome was not just a list of barriers, but a set of coordinated transformation actions that no single organisation could have identified or owned alone.

Shaping organisational strategy and practices

The middle level is about helping individual organisations shift how they think and operate — moving beyond a narrow focus on time and budget to ask bigger questions about purpose and impact. In Live Labs, this showed up in working directly and extensively with county council teams, building their capacity and understanding of Doughnut Economics and its holistic approach. In parallel, the Strategic Tool was developed precisely for this: a structured way for authorities to assess how well their plans, contracts, and long-term ambitions are aligned with social and ecological goals - and to see clearly where the gaps in implementation exist.

Creating project-level interventions

The most tangible level: applying the framework to specific projects and decisions on the ground. This is where the Project Tool lives - a practical assessment process that teams can pick up and use on individual roadworks schemes to surface overlooked social and ecological dimensions, adjust designs and make better-informed decisions. Each project gets a score that sums up its performance across all the dimensions of the Doughnut, but also allows teams to explore mitigation measures that would improve the scores.

4. What actually made it work: the real ingredients of success

The official story of a project rarely tells you what made it work. What is harder to capture - and more useful to share - is what actually moved things in practice. Looking back at Live Labs, the ingredients of success were quite different at each level, and knowing that difference matters.

At the project and organisational levels, success was mostly about people.

A champion inside the organisation. The single biggest factor was having someone who understood the value of what we were doing early on and helped bring others along. Without that person, the tools would have stayed on the shelf.

The right level of curiosity. Equally important was how we showed up: with genuine curiosity about the sector, asking naive questions, spending time understanding how highways teams actually think and work. 

Hands-on, in-person workshops. The tools came to life when people could work with them together in a room, not read about them alone on a screen.

Speaking the sector's language. Translating the Doughnut into the language of highways - integrating existing sector policies and programmes - meant people could recognise themselves in it. The Doughnut was reframed from a big picture economic model to a practical tool for the day-to-day work of highway professionals. 

At the whole-sector level, success was mostly about structure.

Senior support from the start. Without it, a project that aims to transform a whole sector would not be possible.

The right people in the room. Having representatives from across all key actor clusters - local authorities, central government, contractors, suppliers, academia, community groups - meant the conversations had real breadth and credibility.

A safe and open environment. Creating the conditions where systemic barriers could be named honestly was harder than it sounds in a conservative sector. But it was what made the Alliance's conversations genuinely useful rather than politely superficial.

5. What we’d do differently: the lessons we earned the hard way

Honest reflection is only useful if it is specific. Here is what I would do differently if I started this project again - organised by level, and written without softening.

At the project and organisational levels.

Start wider and co-create from the beginning. We engaged the broader group of sector actors too late in the project. If we had brought them in earlier to co-create the sectoral Doughnut with us, the tools would have felt more owned and less imposed - and we would have learned faster.

Know your audience before you inspire them. We used case studies that were designed to be inspiring, but technical teams wanted specifications, not inspiration. Calibrating your materials and language to the specificities of the sector is a must.

At the whole-sector level.

Partner with a sector organisation from day one. An established partner with roots in the sector opens doors, lends credibility, and navigates the "who are you to tell us what to do?" defensiveness that any outside consultancy team will face. Don't wait for that question to surface - address it by design.

Schedule expert interviews from the start. Procurement officers, designers, suppliers - the people who shape the sector's day-to-day decisions. We spoke with them too late. They should be involved in the project from the beginning.

Build on what is already happening. Rather than starting from scratch, look for the good work already underway and connect to it. It saves time, avoids duplication, and signals respect for what the sector has already built.

6. How a sectoral Doughnut can be used — and what it can’t do

A sectoral Doughnut is not one thing. Depending on where you are and what you need, it can serve very different purposes - often at the same time.

Opening up thinking. It changes the questions people ask. It opens up the big picture, shifts the conversation from narrow efficiency to broader impact, and helps people see the holistic - social and ecological - consequences of what their sector does.

Making the invisible visible. One of the most quietly powerful things the Doughnut does is surface what is already happening but never consciously reported. Practices, impacts, and trade-offs that have always been there - but suddenly have a shared language. In Live Labs, this was often the moment teams realised how much they already knew, and how little of it was recognised or used.

Operational and assessment uses. It can also become a practical tool: a co-assessment process, a baseline year, a go/no-go filter, a pre-study, a second-opinion review, a way to monitor progress over time, or a tool to map actors and understand the flows between them.

What it can’t do. It won’t measure everything. It won’t produce magic numbers. It is not a lifecycle assessment that compares emissions between projects. At national scale, measuring sectoral impact is genuinely hard. Manage expectations from the start — and lead with what it is: primarily a way to think and convene.

7. What this means for you: lessons for any sector, any project

Live Labs was about highways. But the lessons apply far beyond roads.

Whether you are working in food, energy, housing, fashion, or any other sector, the same fundamental challenges show up: too many actors with misaligned incentives, too much pressure to jump to tools before the thinking has shifted, and too little attention paid to which level of transformation you are actually working at.

Three things I would carry into any sectoral project from here:

Name the level you are working at. Whole-sector, organisational, and project-level transformation each need different actors, different tools, and different definitions of success. You can start on any of these levels - but in practice, real transformation needs to happen on all three.

Start wider and earlier. The people who need to own the result need to help shape it from the beginning. Co-creation is not a nice-to-have. It is what makes the work stick.

Respect the thinking shift. The framework is a compass, not a deliverable. The most important thing it does is change the questions people ask - and that takes time, trust, and the right conditions. Don’t rush past it to get to the tool.

When we started the project, nobody could understand what Doughnut Economics was or what on earth it had to do with highways. Engineers were sceptical and confused. Three years later, it is deeply fulfilling to see the same people become advocates of this holistic approach - understanding the value of the systemic lens that Doughnut Economics brings, and the importance of breaking silos in their practice.

That is what sectoral transformation looks like from the inside. And that is why it is worth doing.