recognised and form a key part of solution-building and planning, be it with regards to settlement upgrading, inclusive approaches to waste and water management, food security or disaster risk reduction strategies (Miranda and Baud 2014; Boonyabancha et al. 2019; Hofmann 2020). Meanwhile, partnerships with the academic and research communities – often in collaboration with other city actors - have also been important to help stimulate, and often facilitate, new ways of ‘thinking and doing things’ or the development of ‘communities of practice’, able to speak across different experiences and rationales, towards the goal of achieving equity and environmental sustainability transitions (Smit et al. 2021). At an international scale, a number of initiatives have attempted to stimulate the building of coalitions between the research community and urban practitioners and policymakers. For example, the Cities and Climate Change Science conference, co- sponsored by the IPCC, held in Edmonton, Canada in March 2018 brought together these various actors to create the Global Research and Action Agenda on Cities and Climate Change, setting out key priorities for action, collaboration, research and data gaps.
Coalition- and partnership-based modes of governance for urban sustainability and equity agendas – increasingly referred to as coproduction or co-creation (Watson 2014; Mistra Urban Futures 2020; Knowledge in Action for Urban Equality 2021) – have, in their diversity, shown their capacity to start addressing some of the city lock- ins mentioned in the previous section. However, ensuring that partnership-based governance acts as an enabler of environmentally sustainable and just transformations, and not the perpetuation of business-as-usual approaches, requires astute leadership, committed involvement and resourcing from all parties. Sharpening the understanding of notions such as urban ‘publicness’, or of the urban commons, is also critical to guide visions and principles. Partnerships that put environmentally sustainable and just transformations at the heart of urban planning processes require constant nurturing and particular attention to those partnership members traditionally excluded or undervalued. The Memoranda of Understandings signed by a number of municipalities with organised community groups such as members of the Slum Dwellers International (SDI) network or of the Asian Coalition for Housing Rights have been important milestones to ensure enduring recognition of, and material support for, such city-building partnerships.
2.4.3 Institutionalization for Longevity and Scaling Up
A key challenge for environmentally sustainable and just urban transformations is ensuring that successes and innovations (whether top down, bottom up or indeed co-produced) are embedded, scaled up and out and have longevity. Institutionalizing changes, initiatives and innovations or embedding them into institutional and organizational processes and structures can help to ensure continuity beyond the term of a particular mayor, a civil servant’s tenure, or social innovator’s leadership. Institutionalization helps to mainstream innovations and facilitate their uptake at scale, for example from a pilot project
38 GEO for Cities
to a city-wide initiative; or from a city-based innovation to a regional or national process. In practice, for pilot projects to contribute to these transformations and shift ‘business as usual’ thinking and approaches, “they must, at some point, move beyond the initial test site or boundaries within which they were created” (Hughes, Yordi and Besco 2020).
Long term, cross sectoral, cross scale planning for change, developed with a diverse range of expertise is an important objective for these types of transformations. Key considerations for scaling up have included resourcing, incorporation into routine budgets and the ability to attract further resources and support from other levels of government. While some cities have managed to catalyse transitions to environmentally sustainable and just urban development on the back of city-level initiatives, progress and scaling up has been more sustained where such objectives have aligned with national policies and funding mechanisms. In some cases, linking city-level benefits with national level targets and commitments that contribute to global goals and targets such as SDGs and NDCs has been beneficial (Bai et al. 2016; Coalition for Urban Transitions 2019). National government support has also been critical for ensuring learning is exchanged for scaling-up initiatives to other cities, especially secondary cities.
Effective institutionalization or mainstreaming of change at the city scale has also required shifts in policy, in procedures, shifts in methodologies and ways of doing things, as well as staff development (Levy 1996 and see examples in chapter 5). Embedding equity and climate change considerations in annual staff reviews or requiring robust public engagement in policy making (as demanded by the Aarhus Convention) have been important steps that have served to broaden the reach of potentially transformative measures.
Scaling up and mainstreaming change is difficult to achieve and sustain and requires ongoing feedback loops and learning to maintain, deepen and adapt to evolving circumstances. There is a fine line, for instance, between institutionalization measures that risk stalling transformation dynamics on the one hand, and on the other, the failure to embed innovative, ‘precedent-setting’ approaches that point to new, environmentally sustainable and equitable ways of doing things (Boonyabancha and Kerr 2018). In practice, developing and fine-tuning approaches that support experimentation for environmentally sustainable and just transformations by a variety of actors, or through co-production platforms, has often been the result of iterative processes that are time- and place-specific (Bulkeley, Broto and Edwards 2015; IRP 2018). There is no one-size-fits all approach to scaling up and embedding such critical innovations, just as there is not one-size fits all catalyst for such transformative practices to take root.
Finally, the development of city-specific accountability mechanisms has also played a key role in ensuring that new inclusive governance mechanisms and partnership-based responses have kept to, and extended, their transformative objectives. Specifically, ensuring that those communities and residents most affected by unsustainable and unequal
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