The governance of sustainable city business models

Panel: 6. Transport and mobility

This is a peer-reviewed paper.

Author:
Colin Nolden, Centre for Research into Energy Demand Solutions, University of Oxford, United Kingdom

Abstract

This paper analyses how sustainability and climate action relating to mobility, buildings and energy networks are governed in European cities. To this end, different modes of governance for sharing burdens, costs and risks of innovative low-carbon experiments, projects and demonstrations in ten European cities in seven countries are compared.

Some cities succeed by co-producing planning and policy-making with a wide range of public, private, academic and community stakeholders through new forms of intermediation.Other cities rely on a hierarchical approach reliant on in-house expertise and policy-agendas for the delivery of experiments, projects and demonstrations. Others again rely heavily on entrepreneurial governance through outsourcing.

Instead of descriptive best-practices and prescriptive one-size-fits-all solutions for replication and up-scaling, this paper concludes that place-specific governance approaches, taking into account historical, cultural, social, political and administrative complexities on the one hand, and citizens alongside different institutional actors at local, regional and national level on the other, are necessary for the delivery of sustainable city business models.