Conference Agenda

Local innovations and experimentation are highlighted for policies and practices that lead to urban transformations through spatial and temporal expansion and diffusion. However, scholars criticize that rationales for and narratives on urban innovation and experimentation frequently maintain the political and economic status quo and reproduce socially unjust urban realities. Moreover, a major research gap remains on the actual implementation of local action that strives for transformation. Empirical findings are particularly missing when it comes to comparative research on systemic urban resilience that goes beyond climate adaptation. The 100 Resilient Cities (100RC), now the Resilient Cities Network, represented a transnational municipal network that financially supported the development and implementation of local resilience action in participating cities under a broad resilience definition. Partaking cities had to identify potential external shocks and systemic stresses, i.e. present underlying problems for vulnerabilities, across a spectrum that included ecological, economic, societal and built environment spheres. Based on these perceived shocks and stresses, cities had to craft related policy actions in a resilience strategy to establish adaptation pathways for the future.

Against this background, this paper asks: Have urban resilience innovations been implemented and scaled to support socially just transformations? The study examines (1) to what extent and (2) in which thematic areas 100RC cities incorporated innovations and experimentation, (3) whether temporal and spatial scaling was foreseen, (4) which rationales and narratives surround the planned practices (e.g., techno-centric, socially just, challenging/ maintaining the status quo) and (5) whether and how they were implemented and potentially expanded temporally and spatially, including foreseen and actual participating actors.

To explore the research question, in total 1200 actions were systematically coded in 30 of the 74 resilience strategies in cities from the Global South and Global North. The first results show that experimentation and particularly the continuation of (social) innovations only make up a small part of planned actions in the Global South and North alike (120 and 65 actions in total respectively). For this study, I will analyze these actions according to the first four research categories presented above through qualitative and discourse analysis. Subsequently, I trace their implementation through a survey on and interviews of implementing actors mentioned in the actions. Based on this analysis, I compare the results to explore emerging patterns in implementation and the role given to social justice in urban innovation and experimentation across cities in the Global South and Global North.

As part of reaching a sustainable society, our collective mobility behavior needs an urgent transition to sustainability. Such large scale change requires challenging and disrupting beliefs, routines and institutions, i.e. what is considered normal by most. This process necessarily has to be initiated and facilitated by certain actors who have been categorized in the sustainability transition and transformation literature in a variety of ways: niche agents, entrepreneurs, activists, intermediaries or generally forerunners and change agents. However, to understand and enable this change better, the interaction dynamics between these change agents and regime agents requires further research.

In our study, we take the novel perspective of viewing these agents as a kind of outsiders: Individuals, that are fundamentally deviating from the norm paired with their attempt to change society. Specifically, we are interested in what we call epistemic outsiders, i.e. agents whose beliefs differ from a reference system substantially. These epistemic outsiders have a particular transformative agency, lying in convincing other agents of their different viewpoints, practices and strategies to initiate disruptive change in social systems. Convincing regime agents in crucial roles to effectively disrupt core structures within regimes’ sub-systems are essential for unlocking system stability and enabling change.

With this theoretical framework in mind, we will look at insider-outsider dynamics in different German cities on the topic of transport modes. We aim to identify key properties and relations for fostering change towards sustainability in the local mobility domain. We use an interdisciplinary approach of transition studies and psychology in an observational study. First, we will identify important stakeholders in each city (i.e. different types of outsiders as described above and regime agents, which we view as epistemic insiders) and examine how they relate to each other with a stakeholder mapping. We then use repertory grid interviews and cognitive-affective mapping as well as additional semi-structured interviews to look at the belief systems of stakeholders and their perspective on interactions, conflict and corresponding spatial relations between different agents. This approach combines qualitative and quantitative methods to provide detailed insights on the insider-outsider dynamics in the local mobility domain in the cities.

Insights about how interactions between usually conflicting groups can become more fruitful in the sustainability transformations context are indispensable and so far underrepresented in research. A better understanding of the underlying dynamics between insiders and outsiders does inform governance approaches and policy interventions to foster sustainability transitions.

In this paper we report on a comparative investigation into the governance of the decarbonization of transportation systems of major metropolitan regions in the US and Canada. It draws on over thirty key informant interviews in Montreal, Toronto and Los Angeles over 2020-2021. Results point to differences in terms of governance organizations as well as institutions that might be attributed to different federal institutional frameworks. First, unique multilevel governance organizations in the US exist for institutionalizing the regulation of transport-related pollution, namely federally mandated Metropolitan Planning Organizations (MPO). These have been harnessed by the Californian state government to advance climate objectives at the metropolitan regional level. Such organizations have no analog in Canadian federalism, where the transportation planning process is more politicized and provinces have traditionally played a stronger role. Second, we find considerable differences in institutions for land-use planning. In the US federal system, land-use planning is vested in local governments and outside the jurisdiction of MPOs. This has made coordination for transport decarbonization at the regional level challenging. In contrast, under Canadian federalism, land-use planning is a matter of provincial authority, given that local governments are treated as “creatures of the provinces”. Our results suggest that a combination of US and Canadian institutional elements might be more effective. Finally, we discuss findings in light of theories of transnational and multilevel climate governance.

Cities around the world have emerged as critical actors to adapt to and mitigate climate change. However, research on the factors that drive city climate action have focused on the global North and these factors have not been systematically studied at a global scale. Understanding this global picture is important because cities face different contexts, challenges, and opportunities related to climate change. Cities that attend to the range of factors that influence their success can achieve targeted and effective climate action. This global systematic review investigates the factors that influence whether cities adopt, continue, increase, or abandon climate policies and actions. We identify differences in the factors studied, their strength of influence, geographical focus, methods, and focus on climate mitigation, adaptation, and resilience. We find that factors related to government capacity are studied the most, while environmental factors and factors related to the built environment are understudied. Fiscal capacity, city climate network membership, and motivations of politicians and governments have the strongest influence. In the global south, few studies have considered environmental factors, city structure, or the built environment, while government structure has received more attention. Few studies that focus on the global South use large-N quantitative methods, with an absence of quantitative analyses in some regions. Environmental factors such as extreme events and proximity to coasts influence adaptation more than mitigation. This global analysis reveals strengths, research gaps, and emerging trends that can improve how cities govern climate change and make city climate policies more targeted, effective, and ambitious.