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Institutionalising 100 Resilient Cities governance experiments in cities with no metropolitan government: A case study of Living Melbourne (Resilient Melbourne), Australia
Abstract
This paper investigates the institutionalisation of 100 Resilient Cities [100RC] governance experiments in cities that lack a metropolitan government. In examining this phenomenon, the research develops a novel analytical framework that builds upon the ‘beyond experiments’ literature and two conceptual foundations: the role of urban governance context, particularly cities lacking a metropolitan government, and the role of transnational city networks. The framework is then applied to review the case study of Living Melbourne (Resilient Melbourne) – a 100RC governance experiment implemented in Melbourne, Australia. Key findings show that the institutionalisation of 100RC governance experiments occurs in cities lacking a metropolitan government by generating new changes in governance, particularly around two key domains: ways of thinking and ways of organising. The study also reveals that most changes generated via institutionalisation are incremental and reformistic, rarely transformational adjustments that can directly bring about urban sustainability transitions. In addition, this research suggests that the extent of institutionalisation is influenced by three key factors: (1) existing metropolitan governance conditions, (2) internal conditions of governance experiments and (3) city networks (only to a limited extent).
... Such understandings of urban governance and the governance of NBS in cities therefore must draw on the growing literature in this field including, but not limited to: understanding urban experimentation as a mode of governance, drawing on urban climate governance literature [10]; multi-level governance as a lens to understand the positionality, directionality, and functionality of where and how mainstreaming can unfold in cities [18] -whether this is top-down [36,37] or 'informal' [6,7,[38][39][40] i.e., prescriptive or emergent. A key theme that must be considered is the need to understand the ways of using the "building blocks" for designing collaborative modes of governance [41]. ...
... The capacity to implement sustainability solutions can be undermined when innovative instruments and ways of doing developed for discrete projects remain locked to that project [59] and therefore do not become part of toolboxes practitioners have ongoing access to. This can be a result of the lack of ongoing political commitment and support [38]. We argue that mainstreaming helps to build capacities, such as creating repositories of knowledge and best practices, to adopt and persist with sustainability pathways, however success is often dependent on financial and staffing resources that are available -particularly at local government level. ...
... Melbourne and Living Melbourne [6,38,40]. This is an increasingly valuable way to think about and (re)shape urban governance, to better reflect and respond to changing climate and environmental conditions. ...
... Regarding the former, we consider the lack of policy coordination primarily arises from the fragmented governance structure in Melbourne, exacerbated by the absence of a metropolitan-wide government. As suggested by Nguyen and Davidson (2023), local governments in Melbourne generally have weak or no capability (i.e., limited authority, decision-making power, and financial capacity) to drive change outside their municipalities or influence policymaking at higher levels of governments to enhance overall policy coherence. This highlights the importance of creating better governance arrangement in cities that lack a metropolitan government (e.g., accounting for >81 % of OECD metropolitan areas Table 5 Summary of key findings. ...
... c.f., Nguyen and Davidson, 2023) to address existing challenges and foster policy coordination for SDG localisation. Regarding the latter, our findings reflect a challenge in setting path-breaking missions, policy objectives and measures for achieving SDGs at the local scale (i.e., policy directionality for transformative change) (c.f., Bergek et al., 2023). ...
Cities are actively seeking pathways to localise the Sustainable Development Goals [SDGs] to address urban challenges and drive broader sustainability transitions. Despite increasing momentum, scholars note numerous barriers related to the translation of SDGs into local strategic planning, particularly the lack of consideration of synergies and trade-offs. Such hurdles risk weakening g the directionality of SDGs localisation. We point to the potential of mission-oriented policy thinking aiming to ensure long-term directionality and coherence of policy responses to the challenges posed by the SDGs in practice. Through the case study of the City of Melbourne (Australia), we offer new empirical insights into how mission-oriented policy thinking is useful for progressing the localisation of SDGs. We do so by offering a new analytical framework drawing upon Bergek et al. (2023) and Patterson (2021) to firstly examine directionality challenges in localising SDGs and secondly to identify points of institutional progression and potential gridlocks during these processes.
... Digitalization is crucial in the realm of governance as it provides governments with the opportunity to update their management techniques and better cater to the changing demands of their citizens [11]. Using digital technologies, governments can simplify administrative tasks, allocate resources more effectively, and enhance the provision of public services [12,13,14]. Whether it involves converting paperwork into digital formats or introducing online platforms for citizen participation, digitalization offers governments a wide range of tools to improve their operations. ...
This study examines how integrating digital technologies into government operations can enhance urban governance in smart cities. It specifically looks at how these advancements can contribute to the development of sustainable smart cities in alignment with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The research employs two analytical frameworks to assess how advanced technologies impact and integrate with government functions. The first framework examines the effects of digitalization on sustainable smart cities, while the second offers a holistic approach to optimizing government processes through digital transformation. The research demonstrates the various advantages of digitalization, such as enhanced public services, advanced infrastructure, and greater transparency and accountability. Nevertheless, obstacles like data security, privacy issues, and disparities in digital access are recognized, requiring cautious handling. The research affirms that while integrating digital technologies in government operations can significantly support urban sustainability, the strategy is crucial to manage potential threats and foster inclusivity and environmental responsibility. These models provide practical recommendations for governments to responsibly and effectively utilize digital tools, ultimately fostering the development of resilient, efficient, and inclusive smart cities.
... Data analysis in qualitative research carried out during data collection and after completed data collection in a certain period (Díaz & Cano, 2022). Nguyen & Davidson (2023) say that there are three paths Qualitative data analysis, namely data reduction, data display and drawing conclusions. The data analysis components in question are: 1) Data Reduction, Data obtained by researchers in the field through interviews, observations and documentation were then reduced by summarizing, sorting and focusing data on appropriate things with research purposes. ...
This research aims to find out how accountable financial management is villages implemented by the government of Pematang Serai Village, Langkat District as well to find out how community empowerment is carried out by the Village government Pematang Serai, Langkat District. This study used qualitative research methods. The data collection technique used in this research is the observation method, interviews and documentation. The data analysis technique used in this research is qualitative data analysis techniques. The data analysis components used are data reduction, data display, and conclusion drawing. The results of the research conducted stated that the financial management stage carried out by Pematang Serai Village has been carried out in accordance with Permendagri No. 20 In 2018.
The concept of urban transformations has gathered interest among scholars and policymakers calling for radical change towards sustainability. The discourse represents an entry point to address systemic causes of ecological degradation and social injustice, thereby providing solutions to intractable global challenges. Yet, so far, urban transformations projects have fallen short of delivering significant action in cities. The limited ability of this discourse to enable change is, in our view, linked with a broader dynamic that threatens progressive commitments to knowledge pluralism. There are discourses that, cloaked in emancipatory terminology, prevent the flourishing of radical ideas. The ivy is a metaphor to understand how such discourses operate. Ivy discourses grow from a radical foundation, but they do so while reproducing assumptions and values of mainstream discourses. We are concerned that urban transformations functions as an ivy discourse, which reproduces rather than challenges knowledge systems and relations that sustain hegemony.
Urban forests provide many ecosystem services, such as reducing heat, improving air quality, treatment of stormwater, carbon sequestration, as well as biodiversity benefits. These benefits have resulted in increasing demand for urban forests and strategies to maintain and enhance this natural infrastructure. In response to a broader resilience strategy for Melbourne, Australia, we outline how a metropolitan-wide urban forest strategy (Living Melbourne) was developed, encompassing multiple jurisdictions and all land tenures. To this end, we mapped tree cover within the Melbourne metropolitan area, modelled potential habitat for some bird species, and investigated the role of tree cover for urban heat island mitigation. We outline the consultation and governance frameworks used to develop the strategy, the vision, goals and actions recommended, including canopy and shrub cover targets for different parts of the metropolitan area. The metropolitan-wide urban forest strategy acts as an overarching framework to guide local government authorities and various stakeholders towards a shared objective of increasing tree cover in Melbourne and we discuss the outcomes and lessons from this approach.
The narrative of ‘urban transformations’ epitomises the hope that cities provide rich opportunities for contributing to local and global sustainability and resilience. Urban transformation research is developing a rich yet consistent research agenda, offering opportunities for integrating multiple perspectives and disciplines concerned with radical change towards desirable urban systems. We outline three perspectives on urban transformations in , of and by cities as a structuring approach for integrating knowledge about urban transformations. We illustrate how each perspective helps detangle different questions about urban transformations while also raising awareness about their limitations. Each perspective brings distinct insights about urban transformations to ultimately support research and practice on transformations for sustainability and resilience. Future research should endeavour to bridge across the three perspectives to address their respective limitations.
Two streams of literature have become especially prominent in understanding social change toward sustainability within the past decades: the research on socio-technical transitions and applications of social practice theory. The aim of this article is to contribute to efforts to create dialogue between these two approaches. We do this by focusing on the concept of reconfiguration, which has become a much-used, but poorly defined notion in the discussion on sustainability transitions. To understand what is defined as reconfiguration in systems and practices, and how the understanding of reconfiguration in regimes could benefit from insights about reconfiguration in practices, we conducted a systematic and critical literature review of 43 journal articles. The findings showed a trend toward a focus on whole-system reconfiguration and interlinked dynamics between practices of production and consumption. However, our study suggests that a less hierarchical understanding of transitions utilizing insights from practice theory might be fruitful. Future research on sustainability transitions could benefit from addressing the tensions between and within niche and regime practices; the dynamics maintaining and challenging social and cultural norms; the efforts in creating new normalities and in recruiting actors in practices; and investigating the different roles the various actors play in these practices.
Climate change is one of the most challenging environmental and social problems for contemporary urban planning. In response to this phenomenon, city networks have emerged as new configurations of urban climate governance that encourage the implementation of experiments such as testing new solutions regarding sustainable transport. While city networks are gaining momentum and influence as effective platforms to transform and scale up pilot experiments into city-wide schemes, little is known regarding their role in conditioning and leveraging such urban experiments Our paper investigates the underexplored nature of urban experiments within city networks and provides a better understanding of how these networks condition urban experiments. To this end an analytical model has been developed and applied to the case of the C40 Climate Leadership Group (C40) and its Climate Positive Development Good Practice Guide. Our findings suggest that the C40 encourages variation in local climate experiments and the generation of new and innovative climate solutions in member cities. In particular they reveal that the implementation of climate positive experiments has passed the 'variation' stage, is currently in the 'selection' stage, and likely to move towards the 'retention' stage in the near future. Potential experimentation outputs of the case are identified as built environment change, new citizen practices, policy change, infrastructural change and new technology. Noticeably, we consider that the C40 plays an important role in providing fundamental institutional support to implement and leverage climate projects within its member cities.
Concerted action on climate change will require a continuing stream of social and technical innovations whose development and transmission will be influenced by public policies. New ways of doing things frequently emerge in innovative small-scale initiatives – ‘experiments’ – across sectors of economic and social life. These experiments are actionable expressions of novel governance and socio-technical arrangements. Mobilising and generalising the outputs of these experiments could lead to deep reductions in greenhouse gas emissions over the long-term. It is often assumed that the groundswell of socio-technical and governance experiments will ‘scale-up’ to systemic change. But the mechanisms for these wider, transformative impacts of experiments have not been fully conceptualised and explained. This paper proposes a conceptual framework for the mobilisation, generalisation and embedding of the outputs and outcomes of climate governance experiments. We describe and illustrate four ‘embedding mechanisms’ – (1) replication-proliferation; (2) expansion-consolidation; (3) challenging-reframing; and (4) circulation-anchoring – for entwined governance and socio-technical experiments. Through these mechanisms knowledge, capabilities, norms and networks developed by experiments become mobile and generic, and come to be embedded in reconfigured socio-technical and governance systems.
Sustainability transitions in energy, transport or agro-food systems are needed to tackle grand sustainability challenges. Due to the urgency of these challenges, transitions need to accelerate and widen in scope, which, in some cases, is already happening. This shift in gear, however, comes with a series of 'acceleration challenges', including whole systems change, multi-system interaction, decline and resistance, consumption and lifestyles, and governance. Using insights from the new research field of transition studies, this perspective paper deepens the understanding of these acceleration challenges.
Established urban policy and planning approaches are ill-equipped to deal with the wicked nature of urban resilience problems and challenges. To break down bureaucratic silos and foster transformative change, ‘governance experiments’ are heralded as promising platforms for testing new ways of collaboration and urban innovation. This paper introduces an analytical framework to unpack the organizational principles and institutional structures of governance experimentation. It applies this framework on urban resilience actions in Melbourne as part of the Rockefeller 100 Resilient Cities Network. The case studies illustrate that governance experimentation requires active stakeholder and boundary management and acceptance to learn from failure.
Networked urban governance is emerging as a major feature of metropolitan strategy and activity. The field of urban studies is yet to deeply engage in the debates on the new forms of cross national networking that are potentially framing and reframing urban governance and strategy. Yet this dimension of urban governance can no longer go unnoticed. In this article we draw together insights from the extant literature into a research agenda on reconfiguring urban governance. We propose a research agenda centred on three themes: the political economy of ‘new-gen’ networks, especially in relation to the role of economic power in determining participation and influence; the knowledge dynamics in city networks in understanding the socio-spatial configurations that are underpinning the decision-making processes and outcomes; and the implications of city networks for traditional institutions that have in the past shaped cities’ strategies, development and government. Our commentary considers and links these emergent themes, noting how these bear serious and urgent consideration for mainstream urban studies.
Over the past few decades, cities have repeatedly demonstrated high levels of ambition with regard to climate action. Global environmental governance has been marked by a proliferation of policy actions taken by local governments around the world to demonstrate their potential to advance climate change mitigation and adaptation. Leading ‘by example’ and demonstrating the extent of action that it is possible to deliver, cities have aspired to raise the ambition of national and international climate governance and put action into practice via a growing number of ‘climate change experiments’ delivered on the ground. Yet accounts of the potential of cities in global environmental governance have often stopped short of a systematic valuation of the nature and impact of the networked dimension of this action. This article addresses this by assessing the nature, and challenges faced by, urban climate governance in the post‐Paris era, focusing on the ‘experimentation’ undertaken in cities and the city networks shaping this type of governance. First, we unpack the concept of ‘urban climate change experimentation’, the ways in which it is networked, and the forces driving it. In the second and third parts of the article, we discuss two main pitfalls of networked urban experimentation in its current form, focusing on issues of scaling experiments and the nature of experimentation. We call for increased attention to ‘scaling up’ experiments beyond urban levels of governance, and to transformative experimentation with governance and politics by and in cities. Finally, we consider how these pitfalls allow us to weigh the potential of urban climate ambition, and consider the pathways available for supporting urban climate change experimentation.
Intermediary actors have been proposed as key catalysts that speed up change towards more sustainable socio-technical systems. Research on this topic has gradually gained traction since 2009, but has been complicated by the inconsistency regarding what intermediaries are in the context of such transitions and which activities they focus on, or should focus on. We briefly elaborate on the conceptual foundations of the studies of intermediaries in transitions, and how intermediaries have been connected to different transition theories. This shows the divergence – and sometimes a lack – of conceptual foundations in this research. In terms of transitions theories, many studies connect to the multi-level perspective and strategic niche management, while intermediaries in technological innovation systems and transition management have been much less explored. We aim to bring more clarity to the topic of intermediaries in transitions by providing a definition of transition intermediaries and a typology of five intermediary types that is sensitive to the emergence, neutrality and goals of intermediary actors as well as their context and level of action. Some intermediaries are specifically set up to facilitate transitions, while others grow into the role during the process of socio-technical change. Based on the study, as an important consideration for future innovation governance, we argue that systemic and niche intermediaries are the most crucial forms of intermediary actors in transitions, but they need to be complemented by a full ecology of intermediaries, including regime-based transition intermediaries, process intermediaries and user intermediaries.
Urban Living Labs (ULL) are considered spaces to facilitate experimentation about sustainability solutions. ULL represent sites that allow different urban actors to design, test and learn from socio-technical innovations. However, despite their recent proliferation in the European policy sphere, the underlying processes through which ULL might be able to generate and diffuse new socio-technical configurations beyond their immediate boundaries have been largely disregarded and it remains to be examined how they contribute to urban sustainability transitions. With this study, we contribute to a better understanding of the diffusion mechanisms and strategies through which ULL (seek to) create a wider impact using the conceptual lens of transition studies. The mechanisms of diffusion are investigated in four distinct ULL in Rotterdam, the Netherlands and Malmö, Sweden. The empirical results indicate six specific strategies that aim to support the diffusion of innovations and know-how developed within ULL to a broader context: transformative place-making, activating network partners, replication of lab structure, education and training, stimulating entrepreneurial growth and narratives of impact.
Transitions to deal with the grand challenges of contemporary societies require novel kinds of leadership, which can both stimulate novel organizational practices and changes in practices and structures in the organization’s context. This article seeks to understand how (changes in) the external structural context may influence organizational-internal transformative leadership and vice versa, and what kind of work is implied in leadership to transform current business models. It uses notions from literature on relational leadership and transformative leadership as sensitizing concepts. It then explores the leadership work in two case studies, on fishing in Portugal and care farming in the Netherlands. We find a dialectic interplay of the interactions between leaders and others on the one hand, and contextual changes on the other. Using a system-building perspective from innovation system literature, that interaction is driven by the quest to establish legitimacy and market formation and acceptance, knowledge and other resources for innovations.
Re-shaping infrastructure systems and social practices within urban contexts has been promoted as a critical way to address a range of contemporary economic, environmental and social challenges. Though there are many attempts to re-imagine more sustainable urban contexts the challenge remains how to achieve such change. In this context, urban experiments have emerged as a way to stage purposive infrastructure interventions and learn what works in practice. The paper integrates literatures on urban governance and urban socio-technical experiments to extend analytical understanding of urban experimentation. Through a case study of ‘sustainable transport’ experimentation in Greater Manchester, we argue that place-based priorities that inform action on sustainable urban futures are conditioned by non-place-based, particularly national, interests. Our paper makes two key contributions. First, we illustrate how the (narrow) national conditioning of place-based priorities translates in to experimentation in episodic ways that are highly contextual. We detail how national priorities, stipulations and funding are mediated and translated at the urban scale where they set conditions for the range of interventions that are feasible in a particular context. The interventions that follow are then materially embedded in place through experimentation with processes of governing and constituting capacity. Second, we argue that the learning generated through these processes of experimentation is only weakly communicated back to conditioning institutions. The result is that there is strong conditioning of experimentation but weak experimentation with conditions. The paper illustrates how the potential of experimentation is conditioned and thus it brings to the fore the need to understand experimentation politically.
After the perceived failure of global approaches to tackling climate change, enthusiasm for local climate initiatives has blossomed world-wide, suggesting a more experimental approach to climate governance. Innovating Climate Governance: Moving Beyond Experiments looks critically at climate governance experimentation, focusing on how experimental outcomes become embedded in practices, rules and norms. Policy which encourages local action on climate change, rather than global burden-sharing, suggests a radically different approach to tackling climate issues. This book reflects on what climate governance experiments achieve, as well as what happens after and beyond these experiments. A bottom-up, polycentric approach is analyzed, exploring the outcomes of climate experiments and how they can have broader, transformative effects in society. Contributions offer a wide range of approaches and cover more than fifty empirical cases internationally, making this an ideal resource for academics and practitioners involved in studying, developing and evaluating climate governance.
Read more at http://www.cambridge.org/gb/academic/subjects/earth-and-environmental-science/environmental-policy-economics-and-law/innovating-climate-governance-moving-beyond-experiments#3gfmUyF3RPxuK6wG.99
Innovations in urban governance such as Urban Living Labs (ULL) are expected to accelerate the transition towards more sustainable and climate-resilient cities. This article reviews different ULL across Europe and explores the role and potential capacity of municipalities in the development of and/or facilitation of ULL as a form of experimental governance. It focuses on the role of the public sector in the multi-actor collaborations that often characterize experimental governance. The article draws on literature on cities in sustainability, climate and environmental governance, and bridges this with political science literature on governance. Based on institutional theory that emphasizes roles, identities, and perceived and actual acting space, three functional roles for the municipality are singled out – promoter, enabler and partner – in a framework with a set of indicators that are used to analyse 50 case studies of ULL (http://www.urbanlivinglabs.net). The aim is to advance knowledge on how municipalities can facilitate urban sustainability through experimental governance.
Climate targets call for novel policy measures to facilitate widespread adoption of low-carbon solutions and innovations. The literature on socio-technical systems argues that experimentation has a prominent role in enabling sustainability transition. Experiments represent ways of testing new ideas and methods across a wide range of policy fields. Governance experiments in particular can support accelerated diffusion of new solutions, because they integrate policy with innovations. Here, types of success factors in the implementation of governance experiments to mitigate climate change are examined. Statistical analysis of sustainability innovations in the 28 European Union countries indicates that the types of success factors in governance experiments differ from those of product and social experiments. Governance experimentation is more positioned within socio-technical regimes than in strategic niches. These results suggest that governance experiments may indeed provide new transition opportunities towards low-carbon societies.
This study provides evidence that city government participation in global governance networks is explicable by the larger power hierarchy of cities in the global economy. Extant research on city government participation in global governance networks, or “transnational municipal networks (TMNs)” such as United Cities Local Governments, has largely ignored the relevance of research showing city-level connectivity to corporate and other economic networks among world cities. In this latter tradition of research, the level of a city’s connectivity to such economic networks is understood as commensurate with the hierarchical power it holds in the global economy. Using a sample of UK and Chinese cities, this study shows that patterns of participation in a range of TMNs are explained by varied measures of city-level connectivity to economic networks. Interpreted through structuration theory, findings suggest that city participation in global governance is shaped and stratified by city-level hierarchical power within the global economy.
Regional sustainability networks in the Netherlands are rooted in regional culture and have an emphasis on social learning and effective collaboration between multiple actors. The national ‘Duurzaam Door’ (Moving Forward Sustainably) Policy Programme regards these networks as generative governance arrangements where new knowledge, actions and relations can co-evolve together with new insights in governance and learning within sustainability transitions. In order to understand the dynamics of the learning in these networks we have monitored emergent properties of social learning between 2014 and 2016. Our focus is particularly on the interrelated role of trust, commitment, reframing and reflexivity. Our aim is to better understand the role and the dynamics of these emergent properties and to see which actors and roles can foster the effectiveness of social learning in regional transitions towards more sustainable ways of living. We used a retrospective analysis with Reflexive Monitoring in Action (RMA), which we combined with the Most Significant Change approach. We found that reflexivity in particular is a critical property at moments that can make or break the process.
The challenges for liveable, healthy and food secure cities worldwide are immense to future developments due to a worldwide increase in urban population, pressure on natural resources including water and biodiversity, climate change, as well as economic volatility. The quality of life in urban areas fully depends upon how people deal with each other and with their environment through transitions towards improved sustainability. The way in which stakeholder involvements occur through transition of marginalised urban areas is unclear. Against this background, the core challenge addressed in this article is: What stakeholder contributions are judged appropriate for transitions towards increased urban sustainability? Exploring recent literature (2013-2016), based on a total of 94 selected articles, it appears that stakeholder contributions have at least three different meanings in the urban sustainability literature; 1) stakeholder based initiatives, 2) government based initiatives and 3) science based initiatives. The three different approaches impact a stakeholder role in the society in different ways, within the scope of the core societal trends of increased use of ICT, globalization, and the changing roles of state and science.
Cities, and the networked infrastructures that sustain urban life, are seen as crucial sites for creating more sustainable futures. Yet, although there are many plans, the realisation of sustainable urban infrastructures on the ground is uneven. To develop better ways of understanding why this is the case, the paper makes a conceptual contribution by engaging with current understanding of urban sustainability transitions, using urban sustainable mobility as a reference point. It extends these insights to argue that urban transitions are not about technological or social innovation per se, but about how multiple innovations are experimented with, combined and reconfigured in existing urban contexts and how such processes are governed. There are potentially many ways in which urban sustainable mobility can be reconfigured contextually. Innovation is in the particular form of reconfiguration rather than individual technologies. To make analytical sense of this multiplicity, a preliminary framework is developed that offers the potential to think about urban transitions as contextual and reconfigurational. We argue that there is a need to embrace multiplicity and to understand its relationships to forms of reconfiguration, through empirical exploration and further theoretical and conceptual development. The preliminary framework is a contribution to doing so and we set out future directions for research.
Experimentation has been proposed as a key way in which governance drives sustainability transitions, notably by creating space for innovative solutions to emerge. In seeking to bring greater coherence to the literatures on climate and sustainability governance experiments, this article reports on a systematic review of articles published between 2009 and 2015. Based on these results a new definition and typology of climate governance experiments is suggested. The typology distinguishes between the various purposes experiments can have, including niche creation, market creation, spatial development, and societal problem solving. It deepens the understanding of the diversity in experimenting by highlighting the salient features of different types of governance experiments. It can therefore guide future research to generate more cumulative research findings contributing to a better understanding of the role and outcomes of experiments in societal transitions. The findings also suggests that real transitions towards low-carbon and climate-resilient societies will require a systematic deliberate combination of different types of experiments.
In cities worldwide, low-carbon urban initiatives (LCUIs) are realised by pioneers that prove that climate mitigation strategies can be integrated in urban development trajectories. Practitioners and scholars reflect on the need to scale-up such initiatives in order to accelerate the transition to low-carbon cities. Yet, limited conceptual clarity exists regarding the meaning of the concept of ‘scaling-up’ and the factors driving this process. This article aims to contribute to practice and theory on low-carbon urban development by presenting a taxonomy on the concept of scaling-up. Moreover, an explanatory framework is presented consisting of factors expected to contribute to the impact and scaling-up of LCUIs. Two case studies were conducted to illustrate the explanatory framework. The studies are illustrative but suggest that the explanatory framework allows for a systematic understanding of how the impact of former initiatives can be explained, and how their scaling-up can be promoted.
City governments have become increasingly active in governing the transition to low-carbon buildings and cities. They are often more ambitious than the governments of the nation states they are embedded in. They are, however, limited by their national legal and policy frameworks in realising these ambitions. In response, city governments have begun to experiment with local action networks that bring together policymakers, city bureaucrats, firms, citizens, and civil society groups. To better understand their value and limits, this article studies four such action networks from Australia and the United States. It finds that the scalability of lessons learnt from these action networks is hampered by too strong a focus on leadership by the network administrators.
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This paper draws on the transition literature to examine niche-regime interaction. Specifically it aims to reveal and contribute to an understanding of the processes that link sustainable agriculture innovation networks to the agricultural regime. It analyses findings from participatory workshops with actors in 17 Learning and Innovation Networks for Sustainable Agriculture (LINSA) across Europe. Framing linkage as an adaptive process, whereby regime actors and entities adapt to incorporate LINSA, and vice versa, reveals different patterns and processes of adaptation. Five adaptation modes are distinguished and described corresponding to different levels of adaptation between LINSA and the agricultural regime. Understanding adaptive linkage processes within and across these modes as reflexive, learning and networking processes enabled and facilitated by individuals and organisations provides more insights into linkage processes than a hierarchical approach. Analysis of results from 17 LINSA from a number of different contexts across Europe allows a broad empirical analysis and an overview of the interplay of processes contributing to the agricultural regime’s adaptive capacity.
This article discusses opportunities and challenges in the governance of urban sustainability transitions, with an emphasis on the role and necessary capabilities of collaborative intermediary organisations (CIOs). CIOs are defined as a particular type of intermediary organisations that create platforms for deliberation and collaboration between diverse stakeholders. Following a review of the literature on (urban) sustainability transition and cross-sector collaboration, the article discusses two case studies of CIOs in the Cape Town city region, bringing to bear disparate socio-economic and institutional conditions in an emerging economy city characterised by high degrees of inequality. The case studies illustrate the important potential role played by CIOs in urban transitions, particularly at the sub-city scale. They also suggest a number of points that expand upon or create new insights for our understanding of urban sustainability transitions: The important role of authentic deliberation between disparate stakeholders and interests, and the difficulties in achieving this especially in a highly unequal society; the need for an explicit distinction and institutionalised link between deliberation and implementation; the related challenge of embedded autonomy; and the requirement of particular capabilities among CIOs' leadership, with a focus on creative approaches to ambiguity and conflict.
Transformation as an adaptive response to climate change opens a range of novel policy options. Used to describe responses that produce non-linear changes in systems or their host social and ecological environments, transformation also raises distinct ethical and procedural questions for decision-makers. Expanding adaptation to include transformation foregrounds questions of power and preference that have so far been underdeveloped in adaptation theory and practice. We build on David Harvey’s notion of activity space to derive a framework and research agenda for climate change adaptation seen as a political decision-point and as an opportunity for transformation, incremental adjustment or resistance to change in development pathway. Decision-making is unpacked through the notion of the activity space into seven coevolving sites: the individual, technology, livelihoods, discourse, behaviour, the environment and institutions. The framework is tested against practitioner priorities to define an agenda that can make coherent advances in research and practice on climate change adaptation.
Even though metropolitan areas account for half of the population, and an even larger share of economic activity of OECD countries, almost no systematic information on governance structures in these areas exists. This study – based on a novel data set – gives an overview of governance arrangements in OECD metropolitan areas. It shows that organisations dedicated to metropolitan area governance are common, but often have little powers. Nevertheless, the existence of such organisations is related with better performance on a range of important outcome variables, such as public transport systems, environmental issues, and urban sprawl.
This paper examines the Rockefeller Foundation's 100 Resilient Cities (100RC) initiative in Melbourne and frames this as an experiment in urban resilience governance and planning. We respond to the call from urban resilience scholars to consider the 5Ws (who, what, where, when and why?) of resilience and consider what this means for reframing urban resilience implementation. Melbourne is one of the first wave of 33 cities involved in 100RC and the release of the 2016 Strategy is the first attempt at urban resilience governance and planning in this city. We examine its role in mobilizing urban resilience reflecting on the 5Ws and also the ‘how’, as a governance experiment. With no metropolitan mandate and within a highly fragmented governing context, we develop an analytical framework to assess the 100RC Melbourne initiative identifying a set of conditions for transformative urban resilience implementation incorporating four dimensions – governance and institutional settings (how); inclusions/exclusions (who); framing and purpose (why and what); and system boundaries and interventions (where and when). We reflect on how urban resilience has been framed and adapted within this initiative and the extent to which this process of urban resilience implementation may have the capacity to influence, disrupt or change mainstream urban policy and planning frameworks. We highlight the institution building role the 100RC is playing by mediating between, and connecting, actors, sectors, and interests. We discuss the prospects for shaping a more integrated and inclusive mode of urban governance and resilience planning, a need which has become particularly acute in the context of the shock and ongoing stressor of COVID 19. We conclude by arguing that while experiments such as the 100RC initiative can demonstrate new ways of working collaboratively, explicit attention must be paid to the sets of conditions required to mobilize transformative change in urban resilience implementation.
The ways in which institutions are reconfigured to change mainstream selection pressures to favour sustainability is central to research on sustainability transitions but has only recently begun to receive more attention. Of this existing work, empirical attention has mainly focused on the national level with less attention to local dynamics. Attending to this gap, we mobilise theory on institutionalisation processes and insights from the politics of transitions literature and take an actor perspective to investigate the agency of local sustainability initiatives to navigate local governance processes and reconfigure selection environments at the urban scale. Our work subsequently demonstrates the importance of diverse actor tactics, of networking for advocacy and of networking for the creation of informal, ad hoc governance arenas.
Despite the burgeoning popularity of resilience as an urban policy narrative, we know little about how policymakers and planners approach the challenge of operationalising urban resilience or what problems they face. Although their ultimate goal is presumably to integrate resilience goals into sectoral policy and decision-making as well as to dissolve policy silos, the concept of mainstreaming has received relatively little attention in urban resilience literature so far. To address this void, we use the concept of mainstreaming to analyse the two cities of Christchurch and Rotterdam, both participants in the Rockefeller Foundation’s 100 Resilient Cities Programme. We identify three main challenges that are apparent in both cities despite their contextual differences. The first is to make resilience a top priority for policymaking and planning because it competes with other urban development agendas for political commitment. Secondly, institutionalising cross-sector governance constitutes a challenge because participation in 100 Resilient Cities brings few incentives for institutional reforms. The third challenge – to actively engage decision-makers from public and private sectors – arises because urban policymakers and planners are not sufficiently equipped to convince them to invest additional resources in terms of personnel, time and money and to dissolve conflicts of interest between them. In the light of these challenges, we argue that participating in 100 Resilient Cities is a relevant but not sufficient first step towards mainstreaming urban resilience in Christchurch and Rotterdam. In addition to developing a resilience strategy and appointing a Chief Resilience Officer, formal changes (for instance in procedural law and national policymaking) are required, to address the challenges identified.
Nature-based solutions (NBS) are heralded as tools to address and tackle a variety of socio-ecological challenges. NBS are increasingly discussed as a response to shocks and stresses such as loss of biodiversity, air pollution, heat waves, flooding, droughts; and issues around residents' health and wellbeing. In recognition of these multiple functions and potential co-benefits, cities are increasingly developing NBS strategies through urban forests, green walls and facades. There has recently been a vibrant debate about extending, linking or merging successful NBS - often framed as 'scaling-up'. Despite the increasing popularity, little is known about the mechanisms and conditions for scaling-up of NBS and how this plays out in practice. How is scaling-up understood and is there an optimal scale for NBS? Previous work has addressed that the misinterpretation of scale can produce suboptimal outcomes for the resilience and sustainability of human-environmental systems. Particularly challenging is the introduction of new and adjusting established institutional arrangements to drive and coordinate socio-ecological change. Using the strategy 'Living Melbourne – Our metropolitan urban forest' as a case study, this paper explores and analyses how NBS and scaling-up are addressed and implemented in a metropolitan-wide greening strategy. The study shows that scaling-up of NBS is complex and needs inter- and transdisciplinary expertise to cope with a range of ecological, institutional and socio-cultural challenges. Intermediaries are needed to provide platforms of ongoing exchange between the heterogenous stakeholders from public and private sectors, academia and society.
Climate change is increasingly governed through local configurations that are characterised by voluntary action, weak institutions and uncoordinated efforts. The impermanent and iterative nature of such initiatives makes it difficult to determine their enduring and potentially transformative impact. This review systematises how the sustainability transitions field has approached temporary initiatives. It finds broad agreement on the difficulty of sustaining local transitions, but little analytical engagement with how temporary initiatives shape transition pathways over time. The review therefore proposes a typology of temporal dimensions to help assess the dynamics between ephemerality and permanence in local transitions. By mapping the recent empirical sustainability transitions literature along these dimensions, ephemerality is found to be ubiquitous in local initiatives–there is a lot happening that does not endure but serves other functions. Actors deploy a range of local strategies directed at either formalising initiatives or retaining relevance by reinventing themselves, thus routinising sustainability transitions.
As Australian cities face challenges of increased size, density and a range of environmental issues, compounded by climate change impacts, integration of greening is receiving increased attention. Greening, in the form of parks, gardens, waterways, water-sensitive designs and green roofs, contributes to liveability, sustainability and resilience, and habitat for non-human species. Local governments are responsible for the day-to-day management of much of Australia’s urban public spaces and are developing strategies for these areas. However, local-scale planning risks piecemeal, uncoordinated and ineffective approaches, particularly for biophysical systems that have little relationship with municipal boundaries. How can a metropolitan-scale approach be applied to green space planning and governance? This paper presents a case study of Living Melbourne metropolitan urban forest strategy, developed by Nature Conservancy and Resilient Melbourne. Resilient Melbourne brings together Melbourne’s 32 local governments to plan and advocate at the metropolitan scale. While the Living Melbourne strategy provides a metropolitan-scale approach, questions of governance, including how the strategy will be implemented and how local context is understood, are highlighted. Further, in developing a metropolitan-scale approach, how are the voices of local communities included? The paper analyses who is governing Melbourne’s urban greening, and the benefits and risks of a metropolitan-scale approach.
The increasing relevance of cities as transnational actors raises the need to align strategic environmental planning at local levels with the implementation of global goals. To bridge this gap, several transnational city networks have appeared over the years. This paper focuses on ICLEI, the global network of local governments for sustainability. This and other intermediary urban agents support cities through coordination, alignment, knowledge sharing and aggregation, and are instrumental in progressing urban agendas. Despite their recognised functions, their specific roles and practices have only been explored to a limited extend. We address this gap by first, having a closer look at the roles and activities of ICLEI applying role theory for the role conceptualisations and second, by discussing how it links cities and global arenas by supporting urban biodiversity. We assert that ICLEI covers a wide spectrum of roles and activities. With our research, we identified three role patterns that ICLEI fulfils: knowledge roles (translator, educator and integrator), relational roles (connector and mediator) and game-changing roles (path breaker and co-creator). ICLEI and other transnational city networks orchestrate information flows and knowledge aggregation across levels, resulting in more effective knowledge integration in cities and advancing agendas on urban biodiversity.
Urban experimentation (UE) is seen as crucial for enacting transformations towards sustainability. Research in this domain has flourished, but still lacks theoretical coherence. We review this emerging literature, combining methods for problematisation and critical interpretive synthesis, to address two questions: how does the extant literature conceive of the contexts in which experimentation emerge, and what dynamics are thought to be implicated in reconfiguring these contexts into favourable environments for UE? Traditionally, transition studies assume that cities may act as protective spaces for experimentation, but recent studies suggest other salient dynamics. We identify three lenses - seedbeds, harbours, and battlegrounds – which articulate the assumptions and dynamics associated with different understandings of the urban context. We argue for plural accounts of how UE thrives in particular places and offer a way 'to follow’ the co-evolution between a multiplicity of experiments and their environment, through interactions between protection, connectivity, and conflict.
This special issue deals with various research questions regarding the impact of urban experimentation on transitions towards sustainability in different industries and sectors. Cities have been identified to play a vital role for sustainability transitions. Not only are they places with an increased urgency for change, but they also bring about many current sustainability initiatives and interventions. This special issue focuses on investigating the relationship between urban experimentation and institutional change. The articles shed light on various characteristics of urban environments that influence experimentation and potentially lead to institutional change and thus elaborate on some of the distinct mechanisms through which urban experimentation can lead to broader systemic changes.
SDGs and IPCC Cities offer an unprecedented opportunity for a transformative urban agenda. This also requires bold, integrated action to address constraints imposed by economic, cultural, and political dynamics. In our commentary, we move beyond a narrow, techno-centric view and identify five key knowledge pathways needed to catalyze urban transformation.
In light of the relatively modest achievements of international climate change governance, high hopes are being placed on global city networks as an essential solution to problems in climate change adaptation and mitigation. The C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group, in particular, promotes itself as a network that enables cities to learn from each other in their efforts to confront climate change. Very little is known, however, about what kind of change the network promotes and how transformative the proposed solutions are. We assess the degree of (anticipated) change based on a stratified sample of twelve cities participating in the C40 network, signalled by adaptation and mitigation actions described in their policy documents. Our findings indicate that most proposed measures support the status quo, with the majority of actions focusing on infrastructure and technology, and only a few transformational climate measures are envisaged by the cities. © 2018
Cities can play a key role in the low-carbon transition, with an increasing number of cities
engaging in carbon mitigation actions. The literature on urban low-carbon transition shows
that low-carbon urban development is an inevitable trend of urban sustainable future; there is
a great potential albeit with some limitations for cities to reduce its carbon footprints, and
there are diverse pathways for cities to achieve low-carbon development. There is, however, a
limited understanding in terms of the internal mechanism of urban low-carbon transition,
especially in rapidly developing economies. This paper attempts to address this gap. We
examine how low-carbon policies emerge and evolve, and what are the enabling mechanisms,
taking Shanghai as a case study. We developed an analytical framework drawing on system
innovation theory and sustainability experiments for this purpose. A total of 186 relevant
policies were selected and analyzed, which is supplemented by the interviews with
stakeholders in the government to gain a deeper insight into the policy contexts in Shanghai.
We found that the city’s low-carbon initiatives are embedded and integrated into its existing
policy frameworks. A strong vertical linkage between the central and the local governments,
and more importantly, a nested structure for innovative policy practices were identified,
where a top-down design is met with bottom-up innovation and proactive adoption of
enabling mechanism. The structure includes two layers of experiments that facilitate learning
through policy experiments across scales. The uniqueness, effectiveness, applicability and
limitations of these efforts are discussed. The findings provide new theoretical and empirical
insights into the multilevel governance of low-carbon transition in cities.
This review examines two new socio-ecological imperatives that have the potential to reshape planning practice and policy: urban climate governance and governance for resilience. The roots of the new imperatives lie in international city collaborative networks funded by philanthropy organisations that operate at city scale. City networks operating at the metropolitan scale raise issues for Australian cities with distributed governance. This practice review considers the early manifestation of both imperatives in what might be termed ‘policy experiments’ in Australia’s two largest cities: the new climate governance framework emerging through the City of Sydney’s collaboration with the C40 network and the resilience regime being shaped by the City of Melbourne’s partnership with Rockefeller Foundation’s Resilient 100 program. Whilst our early analysis has accentuated the positive to some degree, pointing to different, if preliminary, forms of success in both Sydney and Melbourne, the limits and frustrations that present in both contexts cannot be discounted. Urban planners in many world cities and regions will need to consider and possibly absorb these new agendas of urban climate governance and governing for resilience driven by international city collaborative networks.
Urban Living Labs (ULL) are advanced as an explicit form of intervention delivering sustainability goals for cities. Established at the boundaries between research, innovation and policy, ULL are intended to design, demonstrate and learn about the effects of urban interventions in real time. While rapidly growing as an empirical phenomenon, our understanding of the nature and purpose of ULL is still evolving. While much of the existing literature draws attention to the aims and workings of ULL, there have to date been fewer critical accounts that seek to understand their purpose and implications. In this paper, we suggest that transition studies and the literature on urban governance offer important insights that can enable us to address this gap.
Through analysis of transnational municipal networks, such as Metropolis and the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group, Sofie Bouteligier's innovative study examines theories of the network society and global cities from a global ecology perspective. Through direct observation and interviews and using two types of city networks that have been treated separately in the literature, she discovers the structure and logic pertaining to office networks of environmental non-governmental organizations and environmental consultancy firms. In doing so she incisively demonstrates the ways in which cities fulfill the role of strategic sites of global environmental governance, concentrating knowledge, infrastructure, and institutions vital to the function of transnational actors.
Cities, and particularly urban local governments, are now widely recognised for their part in the complex, multilevel landscape of climate governance and carbon reduction. Nonetheless local government projects and initiatives are often framed as of limited value, outside the formal governance framework, and unable to contribute systematically. In contrast, this paper locates these initiatives as already part of the way in which governing climate and carbon is conducted and as governance experiments. We provide a descriptive analysis of these initiatives across Australia's capital cities, highlighting the domains, mechanisms, and partners through which they operate. We illustrate the enactment of experimentation through a detailed examination of the Sydney-based initiative termed Treading Lightly, drawing out in particular the workings of institutional experimentation and experimentation in governance practices. We conclude with brief reflections on the governance implications of such experimentation and their importance as a site in the emergent politics of urban carbon governance.
Resilience is an increasingly important urban policy discourse that has been taken up at a rapid pace. Yet there is an apparent gap between the advocacy of social-ecological resilience in scientific literature and its take-up in policy discourse on the one hand, and the demonstrated capacity to govern for resilience in practice on the other. This paper explores this gap by developing a performative account of how social-ecological resilience is dealt with in practice through case study analysis of how protection of biodiversity was negotiated in response to Melbourne’s recent metropolitan planning initiative. It is suggested that a performative account expands the possible opportunities for governing for social-ecological resilience beyond the concept’s use as a metaphor, measurement, cognitive frame or programmatic statement of adaptive management/co-management and has the potential to emerge through what has been called the everyday ‘mangle of practice’ in response to social-ecological feedback inherent to policy processes.
In this paper, we argue for an approach that goes beyond an institutional reading of urban climate governance to engage with the ways in which government is accomplished through social and technical practices. Central to the exercise of government in this manner, we argue, are ‘climate change experiments’– purposive interventions in urban socio‐technical systems designed to respond to the imperatives of mitigating and adapting to climate change in the city. Drawing on three different concepts – of governance experiments, socio‐technical experiments, and strategic experiments – we first develop a framework for understanding the nature and dynamics of urban climate change experiments. We use this conceptual analysis to frame a scoping study of the global dimensions of urban climate change experimentation in a database of 627 urban climate change experiments in 100 global cities. The analysis charts when and where these experiments occur, the relationship between the social and technical aspects of experimentation and the governance of urban climate change experimentation, including the actors involved in their governing and the extent to which new political spaces for experimentation are emerging in the contemporary city. We find that experiments serve to create new forms of political space within the city, as public and private authority blur, and are primarily enacted through forms of technical intervention in infrastructure networks, drawing attention to the importance of such sites in urban climate politics. These findings point to an emerging research agenda on urban climate change experiments that needs to engage with the diversity of experimentation in different urban contexts, how they are conducted in practice and their impacts and implications for urban governance and urban life.
