Database of governance arrangements
Across Europe there is an inspiring array of experimentation with local governance arrangements for just and sustainable cities.
What is governance? It can be broadly understood as all formal and informal political processes (involving state and non-state actors) that lead to collective action.
On this database, you will find the summaries of results of a study on fruitful governance interventions for sustainable and just cities.
Would you like to get involved? We've asked some questions in the following sections, and you can share your suggestions with us via email to Philipp Spaeth. If you haven't already, please feel free to join the UrbanA Community of Practice.
DISCLAIMER: This page is currently under review! While the rich descriptions and governance scenarios remain the same, we are shifting our approach away from governance ambitions towards what we call governance arrangements. More detail to follow shortly.
Enabling governance arrangements
Enabling governance arrangements are combinations of actor constellations and institutional settings that have proven a potential to support urban governance towards just and sustainable cities in several cases of real-world (Governance Interventions)
We have juxtaposed eleven “governance interventions” that have been tested in real life across different cities of Europe: how they tried to overcome different types of injustices while furthering sustainability.
You can find background information on these original, real-world governance interventions, our empirical basis, in our database of rich descriptions: how these interventions tried to address sustainability and justice, and more. These descriptions were informed by project reports and interviews with project proponents. You will see references to these interventions in the form of brief examples to illustrate each enabling governance arrangement. The question numbers accompanying the examples, like “(Q18)”, will lead you to the pertinent section of the respective description of a real world governance intervention.
In order to facilitate and structure discussions around the following question:
How can city makers design governance processes for just and sustainable outcomes?
and as a result of analysing and juxtapositioning this material, we are describing below six Enabling Governance Arrangements. These were all observed at play in initiatives that were aimed at sustainable and just outcomes, which makes it likely that they can be useful for interventions with similar goals in other instances as well. But while these enabling governance arrangements show a potential applicability in several different contexts, we do not claim that they are the sole factors for bringing interventions to fruition, as the latter will always be embedded in local contexts with place-based factors being important as well.
When clicking on one of the enabling governance arrangement A) - D) below, you will learn about the ambition this each enabling governance arrangement as well as about the scenarios and detailed descriptions of governance experiments it relates.
A) Create a comprehensive vision of change
B) Embrace flexibility in project design and implementation
C) Build bridges between separate stakeholder groups
D) Commit to a meaningful participation process
E) Tap into existing community networks
F) Develop resilient, and self-sufficient financing arrangements
Which further enabling governance arrangement do you consider crucial on the way towards governance for sustainability AND justice in cities?
Governance interventions
We have selected eleven real-word experiments (mostly within EU-funded projects) and developed detailed descriptions which detail their governance variables and processes. We have also created a brief governance scenario per case studied. These scenarios share general insights in a narrative style, and we hope that they pique your interest and provide inspiration about what could be possible in your city!
We stress that the interventions presented below (the detailed descriptions and the corresponding scenarios) - are not exemplary “successful interventions”. Rather, they are regarded as general inspiration and real-world cases for testing out how to enable translocal learning.
Template for developing further descriptions: Rich description template
Methodology
(Coming soon)