This article investigates how landscape practitioners understand and exercise agency when attempting to incorporate metabolic and climate-positive thinking into projects. It focuses on the decisions through which resource consequences are shaped across design, construction, management and maintenance.

The empirical study combines a survey, focus-group discussion and interviews. It maps practitioners’ perceived influence across the project life cycle and identifies institutional constraints, knowledge gaps and enabling tools. The analysis highlights that agency is distributed among designers, clients, contractors, public authorities and maintenance actors rather than located in a single profession.

The study translates the Lab’s conceptual work on agency into professional practice. It suggests that boundary objects and life-cycle information can improve coordination and help landscape architects intervene at the stages where carbon and material outcomes remain open to change.