Governance of Urban Sustainability Transitions

Our quickly changing world faces great challenges when it comes to the sustainable provision of energy, food, shelter, water and welfare to a growing urban population. These grand challenges are increasingly taken up by cities that become the places where sustainable futures are emerging. This chapter introduces the theoretical and practical transition perspective taken in this book and describes its structure and outline. It frames the dynamics in urban development from the perspective of sustainability transitions: deep systemic transformations that are the result of destabilising unsustainable ‘regimes’ and emerging sustainable ‘niches,’ driven by transformative agencies and networks. This perspective highlights on the one hand the complexities, uncertainties, and resistance that come along with urban transitions as well as the mechanisms and patterns that enable and accelerate them, and provides the basis for new types of governance. We then describe the structure of the book. It first elaborates upon the theoretical ideas and governance approaches related to sustainability transitions. It then draws upon empirical evidence from applied transition management in European and Japanese cities. In the final part of the book, the authors reflect upon these experiences, to what extent they are comparative, and what can be learnt in general with regard to implementing urban transition strategies.

Sustainability transitions pose novel challenges to cities that go beyond traditional planning and urban development policies. Such transitions require broader engagement, empowerment, and breakthrough strategies which enable, facilitate, and direct social innovation processes towards adaptive and innovative urban futures. The transition approach offers a set of principles, a framework, instruments, and process methodologies to analyse as well as systematically organise and facilitate such social learning and innovation processes. During the past decade, researchers and policy entrepreneurs around the world have been experimentally applying the transition perspective in practice under the label of ‘transition management'. This approach is based on bringing together frontrunners from policy, science, business, and society to develop a shared understanding of the joint complex transition challenge, to develop collective transition visions and strategies, and to start strategic experiments. In this chapter we zoom in on the different elements of transition management (i.e., principles, framework, instruments, process methodologies) and their heuristic and operational use in the urban context.

In both Europe and Japan, city networks have emerged aiming at supporting cities to collectively address sustainability challenges. In this chapter, we introduce four such city networks: the MUSIC network in Europe and the Eco-model City, the “Future City” Initiative, and the Green and local autonomy model city in Japan. The numerous sustainability challenges of the networked cities include the reduction of CO₂ emissions, the integration of sustainability in urban planning processes, or demographic change. Notwithstanding similar aims, these networks have a different setup and thereby illustrate different possibilities to address sustainability challenges on an urban scale through concerted action by a network of cities. The MUSIC network is a cooperation project among European cities and research institutes in Northwest Europe, with the aim to reduce CO₂ emissions by 50 % by 2030 in the five European partner cities: Aberdeen, Montreuil, Ghent, Ludwigsburg, and Rotterdam. The Eco-model Cities, “Future City” Initiative, and Green and local autonomy model city networks focus on innovating technologies, services, and business models as well as the socioeconomic and physical fabric of the cities to make them fit for addressing global developments. All four city networks systematically organise learning and exchange between the cities on their pathways to becoming more sustainable.

The breakthroughs in terms of thinking, framing, and unlocking Aberdeen’s potential were realised during the envisioning phase of a transition management process. As thus, we zoom in on the envisioning phase and elaborate its outcomes as being the ‘critical phase’ in which diverse interests, perspectives, hidden assumptions, and ingrained perspectives were expressed, negotiated, and debated. This action resulted in a new understanding of the city’s persistent problems and a holistic perspective for future sustainability in the city. From our analysis, the successful output of the envisioning process was an integrative understanding of future aspirations that comply with sustainability values (intergenerational justice, fairness, equity) and, in turn, created a momentum for inclusive social dialogue and mobilised networks to take the vision into practice.

This chapter focusses on the dynamics of interactions among multiple niche-innovations and multi-regimes that occur under the pressure of slow but structural landscape changes. The energy transition, for example, is one of the core and broad changes that fundamentally impact not only the energy system but also systems of food, agriculture, and healthcare, as well as patterns of economic activity. Little work has been done on sustainability transitions that involve multiple niche-innovations, which may interact with each other as well as with regimes. This chapter investigates the case of the city of Higashiomi, Shiga, Japan, where a community business project called the “Welfare Mall” clustered local production of food, energy, and elderly care in one shopping mall-like venue. The project is ongoing as of this writing. This chapter focuses on the common struggles and challenges of regimes in different domains under the pressure of fundamental landscape shifts. Using the concepts of multi-level and multi-regime, the central issue concerns how the bottom-up attempt of multi-niche innovations from a geographically local context interacts with multiple regimes. We identify the multi-niche as a nexus of geographic proximity and multi-domain interaction, and therefore as a typical example of urban transition. Furthermore, the case underscores the relevance of reflexive activities for urban transition management.

In 2011, the city administration of Ghent started up the ‘climate arena’ based on transition management (TM) to develop a plan and implement actions to work towards its ambition of climate neutrality by 2050 and to involve actors from the city in doing so. This chapter analyses the empowerment of the involved actors to discern long-term commitment to a transition to climate neutrality and draw lessons for TM. TM is found to yield initial ‘seeds of change’ by creating new contacts and synergies, broadening problem perceptions, and contributing to intrinsic motivation to pursue the transition towards climate neutrality. There is a need to differentiate between the arena participants and involved policy officers: TM appears as effective tool to open up policy officers for more open and co-creative approaches as well as cross-departmental collaboration by broadened problem foci. Challenges regarding the longevity of empowerment effects on the arena participants point to lessons for TM, including the creation of space in the city administration before the process and facilitation ‘beyond the arena’.

In the decades following World War II, the city of Kitakyushu in southern Japan gained an international reputation for its steel production and industrial pollution. But in the early 1990s, the city government (hereafter, “City”) began to change its industrial structure and pursue a course of sustainability through environmental conservation, the promotion of environmental business, and welfare for local citizens. The Kitakyushu Eco-town Project, an initiative aimed at promoting environmental business such as polyethylene terephthalate (PET) bottle recycling and home appliance recycling, was started in 1997 to effectively utilise reclaimed land in Hibikinada, located in the northwestern part of the city. The concept for utilising reclaimed land was discussed within the public sector (Committee for Hibikinada Basic Development Plan), and specific contents were conceived by the private sector (study group and advisory committee). Pressure from incumbent personnel, namely insiders with new ideas in established private and public institutions, was important in facilitating the transition. In a short period of time, the Eco-town has expanded domestically, both geographically and in terms of the scope of sectors represented, and overseas to China. The Kitakyushu Eco-town Project can be viewed as a catalyst of Kitakyushu’s transition from an industrial city to a green city. The public–private collaborative networks and individual expertise developed through this project have had a longstanding influence on the design of subsequent projects such as Environmental Model City and Smart Community projects.

In this case study, the authors analyse, through document analysis and interview surveys, the transition process Kitakyushu followed from an industrial city with controlled pollution to a green city with a strong focus on the promotion of environmental industry and sustainability with multiple dimensions including environment, healthcare, and economic values.

The French government addressed the question of sustainability transitions by organizing a national debate on energy transition at the end of 2012, driven by the Ministry of Ecology. The transition motif has also been taken up by local and grassroots actors and initiatives trying to converge in a cohesive society project. These two strands of transitions, one institutional, directed in a ‘top-down’ manner, and another, a grassroots or ‘bottom-up’ sort, question the potential for a dialogue to emerge between these two dynamics and their respective actors.

This chapter draws on the case of Montreuil, the fourth most populous suburb of Paris, involved in a transition management process from 2011 to 2014 as part of the elaboration of its Local Climate Plan. Based on a 2-years’ participant observation within the project team, the aim is to describe the adaptation of transition management to the French political context and to explore the possibility of ‘hybridisations’ between ‘regime’ and ‘niche’ actors—between their roles, relations, and cultures.

This chapter synthesises insights and lessons from the experiences with the operational and heuristic application of the transition management framework in five European and Asian cities: Aberdeen, Ghent, Higashiomi, Kitakyushu, and Montreuil. Zooming in on one of the transition governance principles, this chapter analyses how far the transition management activities outlined in the five empirical chapters of this book have contributed to creating space for change to building up alternative regimes and challenging the status quo. This analysis allows drawing lessons for transition governance principles and for operational process transition management designs.

With increasing complexity, societal issues cannot be managed using the classical “rules and regulations” associated with traditional government. Rather, they require more subtle, network-oriented arrangements such as transition management, in which policy makers are not the only partners, and not necessarily the leading partner either. This chapter takes stock of the experiences with five urban sustainability challenges from Japan and Europe to draft recommendations for practitioners to more effectively handle such issues. It also reflects on examples of when and why to use transition management specifically based on these experiences. These examples show the importance and potential of network hybridisation, in the broadest sense; network hybridisation has sectoral, administrative, niche/regime, and grassroots/incumbent dimensions, all of which can provide opportunities for transition. Regarding transition management, we learnt that information provided by scientists can act as a common starting point in arenas with diverse participants, who can use it to connect their own context and practice to the arena issue at hand. Furthermore, these cases suggested that striving for shared actions and connecting different problem orientations is more fruitful for transitions than striving for consensus.

This chapter proposes new research directions for transition management, building on the discussions and insights from the different chapters in this book. The research directions are clustered along the different application types of transition management: theoretical, heuristic, and operational applications. In doing so, we point to new research ground for advancing the research on transition management specifically and the governance of urban sustainability (transitions) in general.