Governance and participation processes
This page is part of an ongoing, open-ended online collaborative database, which collects relevant approaches that can be used by city-makers to tackle unsustainability and injustice in cities. It is based mainly on knowledge generated in EU-funded projects and touches on fast changing fields. As such, this page makes no claims of authoritative completeness and welcomes your suggestions.
General introduction to approach
Approaches to governance and participation processes that support urban sustainability and just cities emphasize diverse participants and roles in collective problem-solving efforts. Through “strategic partnerships” (URBAN-NEXUS) or social innovation (e.g., ITSSOIN), participants work toward achieving concrete sustainability goals such as “reducing ecological urban footprints” (e.g., URBAN-NEXUS), creating “sustainability transitions” (e.g., INCONTEXT), or catalysing and mainstreaming “carbon and energy reduction in urban policies, activities and the built environment” (e.g., MUSIC). These approaches ultimately attempt to overcome the challenges faced by traditional top-down or silo-based governance structures and processes by convening diverse participants such as researchers and policymakers, and/or by bringing together community members, for example, from the third sector (i.e., voluntary organizations)through social innovation. Bottom-up approaches and grassroots participation, for example, can be critical in such participatory approaches.
Shapes, sizes and applications
While the approaches can vary, they assert a fundamental commitment to convening participants that might otherwise lack opportunities to build and share knowledge and perspectives in their efforts to work toward sustainability goals. In this context, knowledge is co-constructed, for example, through action research, a learning spiral approach, community arenas, an “out of town hall” approach, or dialogue cafes. Each of these forums provide arrangements for for engaging participants in gathering and sharing knowledge and perspectives to address mutually identified problems. For example, the learning spiral approach "aims to ensure the formation of new, supported knowledge, the transition from knowledge to action, as well as the constant updating of the acquired knowledge" (see URBANNEXUS). An "Out of Town Hall" approach engages local communities in agenda-setting by giving them the space to identify the most important issues for them, rather than local governments asserting community problems, concerns and issues in advance. These new approaches to participation are assessed not only based on their capacity to promote social innovation, but also their ability to inform concrete problem-solving efforts through, for example, transition management.
While most of these original governance and participation approaches emphasize bottom-up types of approaches at the local scale, such as place-based and “out of town hall” approaches, some are mixed. A “mixed logic analysis” approach, for example, emphasizes dialogue around larger data sets generated by scientific researchers that are then shared with local communities.
Participation processes in the latter stages of implementation (e.g., URBANSELF) tend to demonstrate increasing success, while the success of other projects such as SEiSMiC “depends on agreement among partners concerning decision-making”. The project INCONTEXT provided lessons learned by coming to the conclusion, for example, that “Shared visions can drive change --even in diverse groups.” A challenge for URBANSELF was noted, “The diversity and sheer number of different stakeholders of sustainable urban development also create difficulties in getting a complete set of stakeholders in our network. To set up a meeting where all people have a connection with the topic discussed and having all stakeholders present is a difficult task. Creating long-term partnerships is something that definitely does not happen overnight” Other projects, such as MUSIC aimed at carbon and energy reduction, revealed that limited time, lack of coordination across governmental institutions, and a short-term perspective pose challenges to sustainability initiatives.
Relation to UrbanA themes: Cities, sustainability, and justice
The approaches to governance and participation processes may not all have an urban focus, but the scales do tend to be localized. Justice is largely asserted in the form of assuring diverse participation, which can be challenging in terms of identifying participants and assuring their commitment. However, most of the approaches include some aspect of environmental sustainability such as reducing carbon emissions or ecological footprints at different scales, particularly at the local or national levels. Governance and participation processes convened around these issues, combined with a commitment to diverse participation, connect sustainability and justice (particularly, procedural justice emphasizing recognition with implications for distribution). The civic-based participatory nature of self-organization (particularly in contrast to top-down and techno-expertise approaches), for example, points to procedural and recognition-based justice at the local scale through civic engagement and contribution to decisionmaking. GREENSPACE, involving extensive and diverse data collection and distribution for reflection across communities (e.g., Choice experimental approach in Dublin, ecological mapping in Stuttgart), noted that, the “Brighton & Hove” case study “demonstrated the potential for long-term sustainable deliberation and how a group can be supported to uphold inclusively, equity and fairness.”
Narrative of change
The main issues that this cluster of approaches addresses is inclusivity - the need for wider and more diverse engagement - in generating knowledge and understanding and garnering important perspectives in asserting solutions to sustainability challenges. The approaches attempt to provide forums that not only engage a diverse set of participants, some of which emphasize including disadvantaged groups or individuals, but provide a process by which they can establish common or collective understandings and solutions.
Transformative potential
The transformative potential of these approaches is in the structured interactive dynamics across diverse actors. Hence, they provide a platform to include different perspectives that are ultimately brought to bear upon the various contextualized challenges faced across communities, policymakers, and researchers. Diverse and wide inclusion of actors and stakeholders and an attempt to redress a predominance of top-down approaches transform the power dynamics through diverse participation, particularly in knowledge sharing. ITSSOIN, a research project on the third sector and social innovation, concluded that, “ the state alone does not seem to be capable of promoting the social innovation, but that cross-sector collaboration has to come in.”
Illustration of approach
Co-creation is about bringing together different people (e.g., researchers, policymakers, residents and artists) to co-create understanding and, in the case of H2020 CO-CREATION project, to address disadvantage in particular. The methodology based on the H2020 CO-CREATION is not yet developed and will be project specific. However, generally co-creation refers to the collaborative construction of understandings across different actor perspectives in order to assert a common foundation in which parties are equal (with equal resources), speak the same language and have shared vision/goals. CO-CREATION is in progress and in 2019, case studies involving the application of the developed co-creation methodology will be launched by bringing together diverse participants (e.g., residents, artists) to “co-create knowledge and understanding” in neighborhoods in seven cities including Oxford, Bath/Bristol, Berlin, Brussels, Paris, Rio, and Mexico City.
URBANSELF emphasizes research on self-organization initiatives that engage citizens’ expertise, experiences and perspectives in urban sustainability by exchanging knowledge and solutions to address urban challenges. Self-organization can emphasize citizen-based initiatives at the community and/or local levels and yet also be considered for a comparative basis across urban settings and initiatives. This approach assumes that active engagement of citizen inhabitants is fundamental to success. Self-organization is in contradistinction to exclusionary (particularly, based on “power relations, valorisation of knowledge and expertise”) and highly technical approaches to sustainability (e.g., criteria) and top-down approaches administered by the state (e.g., Chennai, India and top-down measures as in Kunming, China) and asserts the transformation of inhabitants into active citizens (constituting “real participation” vs. virtual) engaging their own approaches to urban sustainability. It is generally considered an “actor-centred approach emphasising local knowledge, communication and survival strategies instead of technical expertise as the main forces driving urban development”. Examples of self-organization were explored in cities in Europe, China, India, the UK, and others. The slums studied in India included some of the most effective examples of self-organization.
References
https://cordis.europa.eu/docs/results/268/268931/final1-final_publishable_report_urbanself.pdf https://cordis.europa.eu/project/rcn/99659/reporting/en https://cordis.europa.eu/project/rcn/99659/factsheet/en) https://cordis.europa.eu/project/rcn/100669/reporting/en https://cordis.europa.eu/project/rcn/53077/results/en https://www.incontext-fp7.eu/sites/default/files/D5.3_Out%20of%20the%20townhall-final.pdf