Source: Alytus Municipality
Designing transformative policies
Policies act as essential levers in sustainable transitions in several ways. For example, policies responding to global crises, such as climate initiatives, spur demands for niche innovations like urban food production and renewable energy use. Policies can also destabilize existing regimes—for example, by promoting the recovery of nutrients from urban sewage systems for food production—while simultaneously fostering niche development. This creates opportunities for these niches to expand and catalyze transformative changes in the regime.
Here, the lessons from implementing the TANGO- ULLs inform policy recommendations in two significant ways. Firstly, the policy messages emphasize enhancing innovation within public administrations by strengthening local governmental structures and practices, as well as their relationships with other stakeholders. Secondly, they address the multi-level governance challenges highlighted in the previous discussion, forming comprehensive policy messages that aim to guide future sustainable governance frameworks.
Key policy messages to local authorities to drive UTC
The policy messages in this report are organised according to the three key areas of urban sustainability transitions approach: structures, practices, and relationships.
Policy messages concerning STRUCTURES focus on how public organisations can be configured to foster innovation and effectively address contemporary challenges. These recommendations are connected to system awareness and memory, collaboration across various agency levels, and coordination between political and administrative levels (see UTC components 4, 9, and 10 in Table 1). The goal of these structural policy messages is to empower local entities to lead and drive change. Box 2 provides some lessons learned on implementing these ideas from the TANGO-W ULLs.
S1: RECOGNISE THE NEED FOR (SYSTEMIC) CHANGE
- Enhance system awareness and institutional memory to better understand and navigate historical policy dependencies and their impacts.
- Foster inter-agency collaboration and streamline coordination between political and administrative levels to enhance responsiveness and efficiency. Ensure policy coherence and synergize efforts to minimize any negative spillover effects that arise across sectors. Actively work to break down silos, promoting a more integrated approach that enhances effectiveness and efficiency.
- Promote collaboration across different levels of government, and cross-sectoral collaboration, ensuring that different sectors and interests are represented and work together effectively. This approach will strengthen multi-level governance.
S2: CHANGE FROM THE OUTSIDE IN
- Implement context governance by moving away from purely top-down steering approaches, which frequently meet resistance, and moving towards more integrative and participatory methods instead. Context governance is about coordinating and motivating all concerned parties towards a common goal. This is carried out through a collaborative framework within an innovative environment (e.g., an Urban Living Lab or Communities of Practice) where researchers cooperate with other stakeholders without a hierarchy.
S3. ANCHOR THE WORK THROUGH BUDGETING AND LONG-TERM POLITICAL COMMITTMENT
- Ensure political commitment into long-term planning to maintain a consistent vision across governmental transitions. This continuity is crucial for sustaining progress in sustainability initiatives. Frequent shifts in goals and reliance on short-term policies can hinder progress.
- Secure funding pathways by integrating sustainability initiatives into the annual budgeting process to ensure financial support is both stable and predictable. Utilise local budgets to serve as potent instruments for translating local government policies into actionable priorities and development projects.
S4. EMPOWER THE LOCAL ACTORS TO DRIVE CHANGE
- Empower and actively involve a diverse array of stakeholders—including governments, citizens, civil society organizations, and businesses—in the co-development of policies and decision-making processes. The objective is to leverage their expertise to formulate better-targeted policies, co-create innovative solutions, and improve the fairness and effectiveness of initiatives.
- Strengthen decision-making by grounding it in local knowledge and perspectives of the community to ensure decisions accurately reflect the needs and insights of those most affected.
- Foster context-driven solutions: Ensure that the catalysts for change are deeply rooted in the unique context and specific needs of the city. This approach fosters solutions that are both highly relevant and effective, enabling the development of strategies that capitalize on local strengths and strategic advantages.
- Foster connections with different networks and levels of governance to leverage broader support, share knowledge, and coordinate efforts across various sectors and communities.
S5. SUPPORT NEW ROLES FOR TRANSFORMATIVE LEADERSHIP
- Inspire change through leadership: promote transformative leadership that not only inspires but also facilitates significant changes, effectively adapting to the evolving needs and challenges of the community.
- Designate coordinators and establish new roles such as a “spider in the web” to navigate and manage complex interactions within community networks, as well as transformative leaders and systemic counsellors to drive transformative change and bridge municipal responsibilities with international research and best practices.
- Establish an innovation department focused on exploiting synergies between local needs, research, and public initiatives to foster innovative solutions.
- Implement feedback loops that enhance institutional learning and support behavioural change.
- Raise awareness about path dependencies to better understand how existing practices and routines can impact new initiatives, using learning platforms like “communities of practice” for ongoing education and adaptation.
The Stockholm Royal Seaport governance structure allows for experimentation that includes through their cross-departmental sustainability organisation. This structure enables them to engage with a wide array of departments through different focus groups, from transportation and energy and climate to sustainable infrastructure and ecosystem services (where the TANGO-W ULL is taken up). The governance structure also enables collaboration with external partners. Stockholms Stad also has the ambition to grow food in urban environments, which reflects the need to make cities more resilient and less dependent on resources. Because this aim is already anchored in the city, the ULL has a greater capacity to test the feasibility and partner with other actors interested in getting on board. Furthermore, the project leader acted as a spider in the web to build relationships with, e.g., private developers and other departments in the city’s administration, and embraced the role of “enabler” in the Stockholm ULL. The ULL has conducted a feasibility study for growing food in urban spaces, but they ultimately aim to do this by including some agricultural components into a pre-existing planning tool for green space (the green space index). The goal itself to integrate indicators of urban agriculture into a planning tool means that the city is more likely to see success in the long-term because urban agriculture will be anchored to existing strategic work. The Klagenfurt ULL has benefitted greatly from a built-up governance structure of the municipality, working uniquely with projects towards climate neutrality since the early 2000s that help them to achieve their goals. The city’s Department for Climate and Environmental Protection networks with other cities, with European initiatives, and helps to translate international climate goals to the city level. Having an internal structure that enables civil servants to be engaged with European projects that support the city’s climate strategy has been critical to success. Within the department, IPAK is the key municipal organisation that strengthens the connection of the municipality with the international research and innovation as an alternative to find solutions for local challenges. Weiz originally aimed to conduct a foresight process with approximately 80 young people from different schools, and worked with a wide range of stakeholders, including the Youth Municipal Council, heads of departments in the municipality, and two different mayors. Methods. However, the appointment of a new mayor led to unexpected changes in the project. The ULL highlights the need for transformative leadership and for a strong vision, driven by a range of actors, to help drive innovation. While the decentralised governance model works to the benefit of the local administration, the uniquely influential role of the mayor in this context provides an example of how transformative projects can face obstacles. |
Policy messages on PRACTICES shed light on how public organisations can develop, implement and sustain the necessary skills, resources, capabilities, and routines to effectively tackle contemporary challenges. Practices encompass UTC components such as learning and reflexivity, transformative leadership, sustainability foresight, and the integration of innovative practices into everyday routines. They focus on innovative working methods that facilitate the translation of broad environmental and societal goals into actionable local practices and projects. Moreover, these practices support the assessment and reflection on the progress of initiatives, fostering the generation of new knowledge. Box 3 provides learnings based on how these ideas were implemented in the ULLs in Halden, Norway, and Weiz, Austria.
P1. FOCUS ON THE FUTURE INSTEAD OF THE PROBLEM.
- Use a combination of foresight approaches. Explorative foresight approaches use an analytical approach to consider multiple potential futures, whereas normative foresight approaches use one desirable future as the starting point and then work backwards to the present. Both normative and explorative strategies can foster innovation and effective transformation where a future is jointly shaped while also accounting for the inevitable uncertainty.
- Shift the focus towards the processes needed to achieve the solutions, not only the solutions themselves, in order to make systemic change.
P2: ESTABLISH A TEST-BED AREA IN THE CITY FOR SUSTAINABILITY PRACTICES
- Designate specific areas within the city as testbeds to reduce friction and pilot new sustainability practices, such as urban agriculture. These areas can serve as role models showcasing the practical benefits of innovative approaches.
P3: INTEGRATE KEY UTC COMPONENTS INTO POLICY-MAKING PROCESSES
- Implement new administrative and management routines and arrangements that support transformative change, enhancing the city’s ability to adapt and innovate.
- Guide and support research and policy synergies for building UTC for sustainability. This involves leveraging local academia through research policy and fostering inclusivity, intermediation, systemic thinking, and place-based strategies through spatial planning policy.
- Enhance peer learning opportunities between municipalities through both formal and informal networks, promoting knowledge exchange and best practice sharing.
- Integrate reflexivity into government structures to continually assess and adapt policies and practices in response to new insights and changing circumstances.
P4: MONITOR AND EVALUATE THE IMPACT
- Monitor and evaluate the impacts of UTC initiatives to determine if they are achieving the intended outcomes and making progress toward predefined targets. This process not only facilitates continuous learning and adaptation but also identifies any unintended consequences, necessitating timely interventions. Regular monitoring enhances transparency and enables cities to refine their strategies based on empirical evidence and feedback from stakeholders
- Choose quantitative and qualitative indicators and metrics tailored to the specific policy under review. These indicators should encompass more than just economic growth and employment metrics; they should also capture various dimensions of well-being.
In the Halden ULL, the municipality initially faced challenges when trying to implement a food-waste reduction programme in local kindergartens due to the top-down approach from the city. They learned quickly the importance of having the kindergarten manager and staff. Some of the issue was that the kindergartens felt that the kindergartens were highly interested in reducing food waste, but the solution initially proposed (using a mobile application to help with monitoring food waste) did not suit their needs and provided more hurdles than help. With the Environmental Department, the ULL found a way forward to develop an overall strategy for food-waste reduction for the municipality, where the kindergarten input would be highly valued. Finding this common, higher, and urgent vision together was the key to moving forward with transformative change in the municipality regarding food waste. The Weiz ULL already had an idea to generate a visioning process before the TANGO-W project began. As the project developed to work with a specific public space—the main town square—the municipality conducted workshops with an explorative approach, asking a range of stakeholders (citizens, business owners, city representatives, and experts in fields such as mobility and architecture) what functions they wanted to see in the space. Following these workshops, a visioning process was conducted with a normative foresight approach, considering the preferred future and working backwards. Despite later complications with the ULL to move forward in this process (due to a change in mayoral leadership), the visioning work did initially enable the municipality to define the requirements for the new main square, develop a clear idea of the functions of the square, and identify success criteria. The foresight approach helped to make the work personal to the different stakeholders by allowing them to speak into the joint vision with their experience and values without limitation. And the vision serves as a guideline for the development of the square, co-created by all interest groups. |
Policy messages concerning RELATIONSHIPS focus on the collaborative connections with external stakeholders that are facilitated by innovative structures and practices. These relationships are key to fostering inclusive and multifaceted urban governance, empowering communities of practice, and experimenting with disruptive solutions. Such capacities highlight the importance of inclusive and adaptive governance, engaging a diverse range of stakeholders from various sectors in the decision-making process. Box 4 provides lessons learned on implementing these ideas three TANGO-W ULLs.
R1: IDENTIFY AND ENGAGE POTENTIAL STAKEHOLDERS ACROSS AN ARRAY OF FIELDS AND SPHERES.
- Actively seek and involve stakeholders from various sectors to ensure a comprehensive and holistic approach to sustainability initiatives.
R2: BRING THE WHOLE SYSTEM INTO THE ROOM.
- Utilise a “social architecture” framework. This is a framework that coordinates the cooperation between all stakeholders and their ideas, working on an equal playing field rather than through a hierarchy. A social architecture therefore can facilitate reflective learning and cooperation among researchers, civil servants, and other actors on an equal footing.
- Emphasize transdisciplinarity: Assemble a broad array of experts from different disciplines to enrich the problem-solving process and enhance the scope of innovation.
- Foster peer learning: Encourage ongoing social learning processes among all participants to continuously adapt and refine approaches based on shared experiences and insights.
R3: MAINTAIN AN OPEN DIALOGUE WITH THE PRIVATE SECTOR AND ACADEMIA
- Facilitate dialogue between civil servants and transformative researchers to develop innovative solutions that address real-world challenges, ensuring that academic insights translate into actionable strategies. Transformative researchers take up the role of systemic process counsellors who work to open and expand ways of thinking by critically questioning existing patterns, while transformative civil servants are a systemically competent project manager who are results-oriented and govern processes towards their project’s desired outcome.
- Take a systemic approach. Unlike mechanistic approaches, systemic approaches focus on relationship patterns rather than individuals, focus on usefulness and impacts, asks questions rather than coming to the table with all the answers, and is about transforming communication and processes rather than just content-related solutions. A systemic approach is also about co-creation rather than providing information or advice. Rather than identifying singular solutions to major urban challenges, systemic approaches are future-oriented and aim to widen the potential options.
Klagenfurt’s Smart Climate Lab is the latest initiative in the municipality that enables the implementation of the city’s Smart City Strategy by engaging with stakeholders, not only within expert municipal departments but by integrating local stakeholders in a transformative way. The Lab is a citizen office bringing citizens, companies, and other stakeholders together to work exclusively on climate-related projects. The Lab has 6 employees working full-time on this. The Klagenfurt ULL exemplifies the work of the Smart Climate Lab where citizens are engaged within a new smart city district to develop a renewable energy community. The success of the ULL depends heavily on the transformative governance structure that includes the Smart Climate Lab as a lynchpin for networking and building up skills and knowledge. The Norrtälje ULL has had many successes; however, they also provide a lesson learned from their failure to anchor the project at the political level. Due to an unstable relationship between the project manager and the politicians, the project had a difficult time making progress. The ULL was able to make adjustments with new leadership over time but provides a test case for the importance of anchoring the work so that has a vision common to all parties and to the city, not only the project manager. In order for the Halden ULL to find success, the project manager from the municipality has built up a good cooperation base with Smart Innovation Norway (SIN) and with the Austrian Institute of Technology. SIN in the “transformative researcher” role has been able to build bridges between the research and public processes, worked to support and extend the capacity for the municipality, and ask questions to build new knowledge through dialogue between researchers and civil servants. The municipality also benefits from good cooperation between these actors because they understand among each other that they have a shared common ground from which to work. These relationships were usefully defined using the social architecture framework by which the two research organisations (SIN and AIT) acted within a consultant system, while the client system for the ULL was made up of the client, client project manager, advisory board, mentor, the kindergarten administration, and a stakeholder forum (Figure 3).  |