Conference Agenda

The impacts of climate change on water bodies, freshwater supply and precipitation patterns are massive and require a comprehensive reappraisal of existing water infrastructures and institutions. Historically, these are heavily influenced by the paradigm of the ‘hydraulic mission’, i.e. the endeavor to control and valorize water and to secure supply and drainage via (large-scale) infrastructure, which co-evolved with a specific way of governing water through technocratic institutions, ‘hydraulic bureaucracies’ and hydrological expert knowledge. In the wake of the challenges that climate change presents to water governance, however, this ‘hydraulic mission’ and its institutions seem to be failing in the sense that they do not seem to be capable of dealing adequately with these new challenges.

To get to grips with this hypothesis, this paper conceptualizes the 'hydraulic mission' through the lens of recent political science literature on the environmental state, which recognizes the management of the environment and socio-ecological interactions as an imperative state function to which a significant set of institutions and practices are dedicated. By bringing political science literature on the environmental state into dialogue with water-specific literature from other social science disciplines, we firstly map the contours of the environmental state in the water sector along the categories of the system of rules regulating it, the apparatus administering it, the ideas and expert knowledge guiding it as well as conflicts and processes negotiating it, showing the rather continuous and seamless evolution from the 'hydraulic mission' of the 1960s to the eco-modernized version of today's environmental state.

Secondly, by investigating water governance issues in three case studies from the heavily climate change-impacted and water-scarce region of Berlin-Brandenburg (a lake system at the border of Berlin and Brandenburg, the river Spree and heavy rainfall in Berlin), we show on a more empirical level that this incarnation of the environmental state resp. the ‘hydraulic mission’ currently fails to effectively address the systemic challenge of climate change, because its conciliatory configurations are not able to pacify the socio-ecological conflicts that come along with it anymore. Recognizing that the state, however, is dependent on doing so in order to maintain its imperative functions of environmental conservation and social order, we close by discussing which ruptures and continuities with the previous path we already see and which ones would be needed to achieve a more adaptive and reflexive water governance able to handle the current systemic challenges.

A growing literature has emphasised how structural factors shape levels of ambition in local climate policy. Specifically, cities that have larger, wealthier, highly-educated and younger populations, are supported by local universities and research institutes and in which civil society organisations and green parties are strong and active, are more likely to be ‘leaders’ in climate mitigation and adaptation. Conversely, smaller towns, with less wealthy and older populations, which are more reliant on heavy industry and with weaker civil society organisations and green parties, are more likely to be ‘laggards’.

Such studies are informative from an academic perspective (because they identify the key factors that contribute towards more ambitious policymaking), and instructive for policymakers (who can pinpoint where additional support and funding schemes may be necessary to ensure that all cities keep pace with the leaders). However, they neglect to take account of agency and the likelihood that individuals in some municipalities can pursue ambitious climate policy despite operating in less favourable local conditions. At the same time, the actions of key individuals in cities where socioeconomic and political conditions are more favourable could hinder the adoption of ambitious policies.

Given these considerations, how can we incorporate both structure and agency into analyses of local climate governance? This paper presents a framework to conceptualise the role of both dimensions in policymaking, and suggests how they could contribute to cities becoming leaders, followers or latecomers in climate policy. We then apply this framework to a qualitative study of eleven cities in Germany. Following [author removed for anonymous review process], we anticipate that the role of agency and the strength of policy entrepreneurs may be particularly profound in smaller organisations and therefore we restricted our case selection to municipalities with between 50,000-100,000 inhabitants. We show how those places with active climate managers were able to push forward ambitious policies despite unfavourable local conditions, and set out the factors that can help them exercise greater agency in policymaking processes.

Traditionally, city government agencies have been charged with protecting their citizens from environmental hazards and extreme climate events (e.g., drought, heat waves, and floods). As climate change threatens to increase the intensity, frequency, and impacts of extreme climate events, the demands on city agencies to fully comprehend the complexities and uncertainties in urban and climate systems are growing in tandem. City decision-makers must take decisive action to adapt and even transform urban systems to become more resilient to climate events. However, individual organizations – such as city government agencies – often lack the comprehensive knowledge of urban systems needed to take unilateral and decisive climate action. As a result, the urban resilience literature argues that resilience decision-making processes are opening-up (i.e., beyond government agencies) to include private, non-profit, and academic actors in governance processes due to the complexity and the high stakes of climate resilience decisions; a more diverse urban governance network is argued to improve the comprehensiveness and quality of knowledge, diversify problem framings, increase collaboration, and generate more robust planning and successful implementation of urban climate solutions. However, there is a lack of empirical studies that have mapped and analyzed urban governance networks for climate resilience, and even fewer that have compared networks across cities. There is also a lack of studies of urban resilience governance networks in the Global South. Our study addresses these research gaps. In this study we ask: (1) what is the structure of urban climate resilience governance networks?, (2) how do various actor attributes lead to the formation – or lack of formation - of network structures?, and (3) what are the implications of these unique network structures on urban resilience processes and outcomes? We surveyed resilience professionals in seven cities in the United States and three in Latin America between 2016 to 2020 to map both their knowledge and collaboration networks for urban climate resilience. We then analyze each city’s governance network to identify points of intervention to improve climate knowledge co-production, and resilience processes and outcomes by catalyzing and promoting desirable network structures. Results of this study will help urban resilience professionals to strategically map and intervene in their local climate governance network to promote urban resilience to extreme climate events.

Globally, urban experimentation has proliferated across many cities to address sustainability problems. Whilst experiments can serve different functions, including to test new technologies, enable learning, or diffuse best practices, there remains questions about how experiments ultimately generate sector-level transformative impacts beyond the individual projects. Limited systematic efforts have been put towards capturing how experimental lessons feed into policy processes. In this paper we ask how can we systematically capture the sector-level impacts of urban experimentation while considering their place-based influences?

Rather than seeing place as a mere territorial ‘container’ for experiments, here we conceive place as a structure that is open and yet bounded, constituted through the interplay of multiple social and material elements. We build on a framework that has been tested in a large N-study of experiments across 100 cities. They emphasise the following place-based conditions: governance & stakeholder networks, policy visions and plans, localised learning processes, financial resources and funding structures, localised informal institutions, natural endowments and resources, and urban materiality. We complement this with an operationalisation of impacts in terms of how experiment generates new discourse, institution, resource, and relationships which may feed into sector-wide policy shifts. Employing a desktop approach, we develop a database that captures these place-based conditions and sectoral impacts across forty cases of water and energy experimentations across two Australian cities.

The database captures the diversity of urban experimentation approaches (in terms of degrees of novelty and types of intervention) while facilitating comparison across the two sectors. We could discern specific governance patterns, presence/absence of policy drivers, funding patterns, learning extents, and variable influences of informal institutions. Material conditions, such as resource problems and availability lands, appear as important determinants behind many experimentations. Evidence of sector-wide impacts can be systematically presented; however, it remains difficult to establish the causal relationships between impact and experimentation. Despite this, we have advanced research by providing a useful operationalisation of the sector-wide impacts. Future development is needed to complement the database with in-depth studies to further unravel these transformative relationships in terms of a multi-causal phenomenon, involving direct/indirect influences of experiment(s) but also other plausible factors. Practically speaking, we hope that this database approach could be further developed as an evidence-based tool that is oriented towards policymakers. In this regard, its design could be updated with more user-friendly features, functionalities, and interface to facilitate a systematic exploration of lessons to support decisions in scaling sustainability experimentation.

To ensure proper climate change adaptation (CCA), low-lying countries should prioritize the biophysical interests of the delta and plan decades ahead to cope with land subsidence, sea-level rise, and extreme weather events. But these long-term considerations often collide with short-term interests (e.g. housing/project development). We call such collisions temporal tensions (TTs), playing out in temporal tension areas (TTAs).

Recently, various approaches have emerged to better address TTs, including the dual (acute and creeping) crisis perspective (public administration); mainstreaming of CCA, and work on foresight and imagination. These approaches help to engage with and transform real-world planning, but efforts risk becoming fragmented. We, therefore, propose to bring these various contributions together into one coherent framework.

As a point of departure, we turn to the Solution Space approach (SoSp), referred to as ‘the space within which opportunities and constraints determine why, how, when, and who adapts to climate risks’. The SoSp takes the biophysical characteristics of areas as its point of departure and from there illustrates the changing bandwidth for CCA measures. While biophysically inspired, the SoSp has incorporated social dimensions, allowing the identification of a variety of factors that shape the solution space: a.o. sea level rise; change in discourse/national mood (climate awareness); take-up of novel technologies (floating homes). The SoSp enables different CCA pathways, but decision-makers should recognize which pathway they are on and what routes they are closing off.

We propose to, first, enrich this approach through a more explicit incorporation of the representation of different futures. We adopt the concept of ‘imaginative logics’, referred to as ‘the set of principles underlying or constituting an imaginative intervention, by means of which an abstract phenomenon is made present to the audience’. Our central premise is that we need a broader and more in-depth understanding of imagination in order to expand the SoSP. More concretely: we hypothesize that imagination is key to developing more possible and plausible future pathways, e.g. by redesigning land development instruments, the financial tool that municipalities and project developers use, or involving actors with a radically different temporal perspective on land use. Second, the SoSp should be better tailored to the needs of different actors in TTAs, responding to the critique of the implicit cockpitisim of the SoSp. In conclusion, we reflect on the next steps in its development as well as an outline of a research agenda.